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Most Recent Posts

Tax Lawyer Advises Jeff Bezos To Use Social Welfare Organization For His Philanthropy

One of the things that would hold donors back from funding 501(c)(4) was uncertainty about whether such gifts would be subject to gift tax.  IRS revenue agents looking into that possibility provided some grist for the seemingly endless IRS scandal as disclosed by a Judicial Watch document dump that I covered here.  Congress fixed that in 2015.  There is still an estate tax issue but Mr. Miller indicates there is a fix to that.   It is pretty technical, so I will let you dig that out of his article if it is worrying you.

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IRS Does Not Get Hip-Hop And Hold Onto That NOL Substantiation

There is a pretty fascinating story involving Hulk Hogan, which is really beyond the scope of this piece except to note that Hulk Hogan was upset that his daughter, Brooke Hogan, had an offer from a “black billionaire guy” to back her music career, possibly to please his son. There are reports, which I won’t link to that the son was Stack$ and you can find if you look a Brooke Hogan video produced by SoBe.

Overall none of this is very edifying, but I note that Hulk Hogan, to the contrary notwithstanding, Mr. Barker does not appear on the Forbes list of billionaires.  The revelation of Hulk Hogan’s remarks came about in some litigation that you can read about in Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, and the Anatomy of Intrigue by Ryan Holiday.

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Fight Against Chicago Streaming Tax Part Of Larger Struggle To Limit Government

Fight Against Chicago Streaming Tax Part Of Larger Struggle To Limit Government

One argument was that the tax violated the Internet Tax Freedom Act because the tax was not imposed on “automatic amusement machines”, which would seem to favor pinball wizards over hardcore gamers.  The city does, however, have an annual tax on the machines, which seems a lot more practical than taking a percentage.  Also, the City taxes live performances at a lower rate.  The court was OK with that because live performances are different than experiencing things on the internet.  Who knew?

On that issue of being taxed by the city even when you are not in the city, that is addressed by the Mobile Sourcing Act.  And there was a Commerce Clause argument which went nowhere..  All in the plaintiffs seem to have put on a first-class effort, which to me is a little out of proportion to three bucks or so on the Netflix bill.

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Trump Foundation Truth And Poetry

Now I’m not a Trump supporter by any means.  I attended a rally in Worcester Mass in 2015, which I reported on here.  He suggested in his speech that John Kerry screwed up in Iran so badly because he hadn’t read Art of the Deal.  I followed up the rally by reading Art of The Deal myself.  My conclusion, based on his own words, was that I did not want this man to be in charge of anything I was involved with including my country.  Nonetheless, I am inclined to “give the guy a little”, as Tony Schrantz pleads.  The most that can be reasonably extracted from the NY AG complaint is some lessons about how not to run a private foundation.  The closing lines of the Bruce Hopkins poem sums it up pretty well.

The lesson here is obvious – exempt orgs and foundation law can be tricky.

Yet, running a private foundation is really rather straightforward, quite easy.

The Trump Foundation overlooked the greatest solution in this situation:

Hire a bunch of foundation lawyers, pay them well; that’s the safest alchemy.

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Using Bank Of America As Trustee Can Be Costly For Massachusetts Residents

Using Bank Of America As Trustee Can Be Costly For Massachusetts Residents

The abatement applications for the 34 trusts totaled $2,287,707.  The Massachusetts income tax rate in 2008 was 5.3%.  I’ve been trying to do a back of the envelope computation to estimate how much in assets under management must be there and then project that to nearly 3,000 trusts.  I’m going to go with many billions.  It would seem that the beneficiaries of these trusts would be a lot a better off, if the trusts were domiciled some place other than Massachusetts.  If they suggest to BOA, that it should resign in favor of such a trustee, what is its counterargument? Then there is the question of future trust business.  It seems like there are some really high stakes here.  It may be that the solution will be to drop the trustee function into a subsidiary in a friendlier jurisdiction maybe Alaska or Florida, which have rewritten their perpetuity rules to allow for dynasty trusts that are really dynastic.  Then again, Massachusetts might redesign its fiduciary income tax system to hang onto white collar jobs.  It should be interesting.

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Wayfair Shows Supreme Court Can Change Its Mind – What’s Next?

Wayfair Shows Supreme Court Can Change Its Mind – What’s Next?

On the retailer piece, Jeff is referring to outfits like my fantasy retail operation Pete’s Pokemon And PT’s, that sells vintage Pokemon cards, models of PT 109, and Spanish American War memorabilia over the internet.  The “You may fire when ready” t-shirts are flying off the shelves.  The business is pretty evenly spread across the country, though, and the South Dakota statute has a $100,000 threshold. If Pete’s were doing $100k in South Dakota, it would be doing nearly $40 million nationally and could afford to deal with the sales tax.  The other threshold is a little more troubling – 200 or more separate transactions.  I don’t remember ever buying something that cost more than five hundred bucks over the internet, so that is what will likely pull retailers in.

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Trump Foundation Campaign Coordination Worst-Case Tax Scenario

I asked Mr. Hopkins if he saw anything criminal in all this and he did not think so. I know you may have read other people saying otherwise, but Mr. Hopkins does not see anything criminal.  Remember the sui generis.  There is no precedent for anything like went on, probably because it would take a Donald Trump to make it happen and he is also on the sui generis side.  A lot of tax crimes require an element of willfulness, which would be very difficult to prove in this case.

Mr. Hopkins also noted that a skillful advocate would be able to provide other ways of looking at what happened.  Here is one I came up with.  The foundation wanted to help veterans.  I mean, who doesn’t?  The veterans’ groups reached out to the campaign because it was more prominent and had more infrastructure.  By involving the campaign in the donation you were highlighting Mr. Trump’s concern about veterans as he mourned the debilitating foot condition that cut off his own military career at the high school cadet level.  But. But. You are also giving more publicity to organizations like the Puppy Jake Foundation, which really is a very worthy cause.  Maybe that is what the foundation had in mind and it was the foundation exploiting the campaign for charitable purposes and not the campaign exploiting the foundation for political purposes.  Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

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Trump Foundation Imbroglio With New York AG Serves As A Lesson For Small Foundations

Reilly’s Fourth Law of Tax Planning – Execution isn’t everything but its a lot.  If the two Donalds, Eric and Ivanaka had sat with CFO Allen Wessellberg once a year and had some minutes typed up about the approved donations for the coming year, that would have defused a significant part of the AG complaint.  When donations not on the list came up, there could have been an email vote.  There is a decent chance that would have prevented the political contribution.  Somebody should have been following up on acknowledgments which would have uncovered the problems with the paintings.  Why did it not run that way?  Because it is not Trump’s style.  Again from Art of the Deal.

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