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Most Recent Posts

IRS Denies Exempt Status To Group Helping Undocumented Aliens Leave USA

IRS Denies Exempt Status To Group Helping Undocumented Aliens Leave USA

I have been unable to penetrate the redaction on this ruling, so I have no candidates for the particular organization that was denied exempt status by this ruling.  Reading between the lines of the ruling, it does seem to be coming from a place of right-wing populism, that I am not really that sympathetic with.  Nonetheless, I think the IRS case for denying exempt status is on the weak side.

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Tax Court Drops The Hammer On Employee Welfare Plan

Tax Court Drops The Hammer On Employee Welfare Plan

Whatever the merits of the Sterling Plan might have been relative to other 419 plans, the Tax Court came down hard on it. In Our Country Home Enterprise Inc several taxpayers involved in the Sterling Plan ended up with business entities being denied deductions, individual beneficiaries being required to recognize income and an enhanced 30% accuracy penalty for failing to adequately disclose a listed transaction. Total tax and penalty was over $3 million. The decisions on the small number of taxpayers will be applied to over 40 others. The decision covered plans that were run by C corporations and S corporations with and without life insurance involved.

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Charity Begins At Home But Should Not End There

Charity Begins At Home But Should Not End There

I’d like to draw a lesson from this story, but I’m not sure what it is.  You can’t set up a not-for-profit to just benefit your own family is one rather obvious one.  The really intriguing part to me is the “damages due to poor drafting”.  I have to wonder whether somebody forgot about the generation skipping  tax or maybe didn’t realize that the nephew and nieces were actually grand nephews and grand nieces.  Maybe when the Schaller decision comes out all will be made clear.

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Court Agrees Lois Lerner’s Group Did Not Trigger Individual Audits

Court Agrees Lois Lerner’s Group Did Not Trigger Individual Audits

The problem with that type of anecdotal evidence is that every year some number of people are going to be audited for the first time.  You would expect that some number of those audited in say 2011 were active in the Tea Party or similar groups.

You are never going to convince most of those people that it was just luck of the draw.  It would be very hard to make a statistical inference about whether Tea Party affiliation or something like that affected individual audit probability, since it is hard to define the group that the sample is being drawn from and it is possible, even likely, that the people who became involved in the conservative causes were people who already had a higher than average probability of being audited.

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Raw Story Notices When Kent Hovind Seen With Jim Bob Duggar

Raw Story Notices When Kent Hovind Seen With Jim Bob Duggar

One of the mysteries of the Hovind case has been its failure to break into mainstream media.   Hovind made the rounds of the right wing conspiracy alternative media, most notably Alex Jones, which embraced his religious persecution narrative.  There has been some light coverage by the Pensacola New Journal, which had to pull its reporter from the courtroom in March to cover a tragic helicopter crash.

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Kent Hovind’s Battle With IRS – Collateral Damage

Kent Hovind’s Battle With IRS – Collateral Damage

Hovind and his co-defendant, Creation Science Evangelism trustee, Paul Hansen took steps to protect the properties, since they believed that the seizure would ultimately be reversed.  Those steps were what gave rise to this years trial for mail fraud, conspiracy and contempt of court.  The jury did not reach a verdict on most of the more serious charges but found both Hovind and Hansen guilty of contempt. The government ultimately did not proceed with retrial.   Hovind’s contempt conviction was dismissed by Judge Rodgers, but Hansen is still awaiting sentencing.

Anthony Jaworski purchased one of the trust properties from the federal government.  Kent Hovind has expressed some sympathy for him, since Kent expects to regain the property.  Paul Hansen had, apparently unbeknownst to Kent Hovind, sent Jaworski a letter warning him that he did not really have good title to the property and was obligated to pay the trust rent. The letter was used as evidence at the trial and Jaworski was called to testify.

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Will IRS Force Gay Marriage On Conservative Churches?

Will IRS Force Gay Marriage On Conservative Churches?

The cause of the immediate controversy is the inelegant answer which the Solicitor General offered to Justice Alito’s question about the potential application of Bob Jones to churches which decline to perform same-sex marriages. For the short-run, it is implausible that either the IRS or the Obama Administration will pursue this issue. For the long-run, those religious institutions which refuse to perform same-sex marriages are correct to assume that some same-sex marriage advocates will press for the loss of tax-exempt status of churches, synagogues and mosques which decline to recognize such marriages. 

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