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Most Recent Posts

Moneygram Loses Big In Tax Court And Nobody Seems To Care

Moneygram Loses Big In Tax Court And Nobody Seems To Care

Moneygram ended up with a loss of over half a billions dollars.  Even though C corporations don’t get a favorable rate on capital gains, they are still limited in their ability to take capital losses, much as individuals are.  Whether Moneygram’s loss was capital or ordinary depended on whether or not it is bank.  Moneygram, of course argued that it was a bank and the IRS argued that it was not.  It turns out that it is not a bank, because —-  Well, because the Tax Court says it is not, but of course there are reasons.

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Exclusive – Kent Hovind Claims Congressmen Are Looking Into His Case

Exclusive – Kent Hovind Claims Congressmen Are Looking Into His Case

The rumor is that the interview was going to be cut down to two minutes and run on CNN prompting a call for the entire interview to be posted.  The latter was actually the plan all along and I never had any contact with CNN.  With that said, I really would not mind if people started contacting CNN to ask when Pete Reilly’s Kent Hovind interview is going to run.  What would be really cool would be to hear from my possible cousin Bill who is on Fox.  He poached a clip from my Jill Stein interview without giving any credit to me or Interlock Media.

Like my Jill Stein interview, this inteview will also be cut down into a number of topically based shorter sequences.  Also like my Jill Stein interview and the soon to be released interview with Ernie Land, it was professionally produced, although on a shoe string budget entirely funded by a notorious cheapskate.  I’m the cheapskate, of course.  The production is the work of documentary film maker Jonathan Schwartz of Interlock Media.  Among his credits are Turned Out and Faith in the Big House so he is far from a jail house interview virgin. His current project concerns the feminist icon Margaret Fuller.

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Bitter CPA Fight Good For Attorneys And Nobody Else

Bitter CPA Fight Good For Attorneys And Nobody Else

Mr. Waldman’s ex-partners won in district court – kind of. They were awarded the minimum which totaled $15,000. That is understandable, since getting a bad 1099 or W-2 will probably not do you much damage if you know what you are doing and the victims were CPAs. No award for attorneys fees, though. And I bet the fees came to more than 15 grand making for something of a Pyrrhic victory. Apparently they were not satisfied with the amount of wealth that had been transferred to the legal profession by the accounting profession. So they appealed. Mr. Waldman appealed also.

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Will Kent Hovind Become This Year’s Cliven Bundy?

Will Kent Hovind Become This Year’s Cliven Bundy?

 Ernie Land tells me that they have not been able to raise enough money for a conventional defense.  He also indicated that there is a group of businessmen anxious to back a commercial version of Dinosaur Adventureland that Kent could provide the intellectual guidance for.  One of their conditions is that he become conventionally tax compliant.  Kent has actually indicated that he might consider adopting a similar course to Eric and focus on exposing the lies of evolution and saving souls to the exclusion of fighting the tax system.  I hope it is not too late for that.

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President Obama Would Make Death A Taxable Event

This proposal is so radical because it goes far beyond carryover basis.  It makes death and gifting realization events.  If a family has an appreciated asset that will be held indefinitely one strategy would be to gift it gradually taking advantage of annual exclusions and perhaps aggressive valuations.  This proposal would create the possibility of an immediate income tax event.  Furthermore, this proposal would, in effect, be creating an estate tax for smaller estates.

Of course, we don’t have the devilish details yet.  There is talk of a small business exception.  You could come up with other examples that would work a hardship on a middle class family that has for example a cherished vacation home.

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On SF Payroll Tax, Managing Partners And Pirate Captains

On SF Payroll Tax, Managing Partners And Pirate Captains

CPDB filed the lawsuit to recover a potion of the payroll tax paid on the compensation of its equity partners – $194,903.  That’s just shy of $13 million in compensation they were splitting up if I did the math right.  The argument is that that equity partner compensation should only be subject to the payroll tax to the extent that it is guaranteed.   Essentially, CPDB was trying to smuggle federal income tax principles into the city’s payroll tax computations.

The Internal Revenue Code defines guaranteed payments as amounts paid to partners that do not hinge on partnership profits.  Such payments are deductible to the partnership and included in the partner’s income.  When it comes to equity partners, that can be a meaningless distinction.  One way to split things is to have fixed draws and then some sort of convoluted formula to split up the balance possibly involving the arbitrary rulings of a dictator of greater or lesser benevolence, who usually is just a bit of a sociopath.  On pirate ships he is called the captain.  The modern term is managing partner. What happens if you don’t make draw?  After having a couple of people walk the plank so such a travesty does not happen in the future, the pain has to be spread one way or another.  Ultimately there have to be some partners who have none of their compensation guaranteed, should the sky fall in.

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IRS Revokes Exempt Status Of Faux Veterans Groups

IRS Revokes Exempt Status Of Faux Veterans Groups

One of the rather curious things about the IRS scandal narrative is that the investigation of groups causes quite a bit of angst, but when the IRS actually takes action either denying or revoking exempt status, there is hardly a ripple on the tax blogosphere.   There have been a few denials of 501(c)(4) status, that have gone largely unremarked and now we have two revocations of 501(c)(19) status – Veterans Organizations. The rulings Private Letter Ruling 201451042 and Private Letter Ruling 201451041 give a history of the evolution of the tax treatment of Veterans’ Organizations and highlight the abuse that the IRS was concerned about in the audits that created the flurry of stories last year and perhaps a chance to reflect on how the road to hellish tax complexity is paved with good intentions .

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Charities In Pennsylvania Must Be Pure To Avoid Local Property Taxes

The Pennsylvania legislature had passed a statute to broaden and clarify the definition of “purely public charity”, but the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled that its definition is based on the Pennsylvania constitution and cannot be overridden by the legislature.  There is a movement for a constitutional amendment which requires positive votes in two consecutive sessions of the legislature and then a statewide vote.  The second approval may come up in 2015.  Last month the auditor general issued a report to give a feel for the stakes in the controversy.  A sample of 10 out of the 67 counties in Pennsylvania showed over $1.5 billion in property taxes not paid by organizations with charitable status.

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