Most Recent Posts
Xavier High School Memories Of The First Inspection
One of my early blogging goals was to become the "Tom Sawyer" of blogging by getting other people to create material for me. Sadly one of the occasional edicts from...
Pastor Calls For Church Transparency With IRS Form 990
Reverend Jones has not attracted a lot of attention with his petition as far as I can tell. Religious leaders might want to take note and ponder whether the exemptions and privileges that they cling to so fiercely might be counter-productive to their mission.
Comprehensive Tax Reform Threatens Supply Of Affordable Rental Housing
But you might not be able to create the same coalition to support a spending program, which by its nature seems to compete with all other spending programs, while tax incentives seem like a free lunch. And to take the argument one step further, it may be that tax incentives, while not a free lunch, might be a bargain lunch. The assumption in the concept of tax expenditures is that if you eliminate them revenue will rise by a corresponding amount, by I am a little skeptical of that. It might be that some of those responding to tax incentives would engage in flakier behavior of less social utility than whatever the tax incentives were pushing them toward.
Tax Shelter Guru Gets $60 Million IRS Penalty And No Day In Court
Due to circumstances beyond the scope of this post, John Larson was one of the very few participants who ended up doing time because of all these shenanigans. Being generally aware of these circumstances I was puzzled about how he could have possibly had the $1.4 million that he put up to try to get his day in court. I found a clue in another decision that came down while he was still in prison. Larson had originally been fined $6 million, which he paid. He appealed the fine and a court cut it in half, but the IRS went for a jeopardy assessment on the refund, because they were still not done with him civilly. In the litigation on the jeopardy assessment we get:
Rudy Davis And The Prisoners He Looks Out For
When Kent Hovind was facing another conviction last year that would have meant much more time in federal prison, a fair analysis might be that his liberty was saved by...
IRS Denies Exempt Status To Scholarship Fund Targeted To Founder’s Child
It might have worked just by luck of the draw, but the couple might have done a couple of things to help. They could have found some friends to act as the foundation officers, assuming, for the sake of argument, that people that self-centered actually have friends.
Kent Hovind Innocence Narrative The Latest Chapter
Kent Hovind's latest innocence narrative was long delayed (Originally it was going to be a January surprise. January 2016) and had a false start, but it is up and...
IRS Cracking Down On Easement Donation Syndications
Given the high value of the castles in the air that some appraisers can conjure, you can see that ultimately the owners of property have much more in the way of potential tax benefit than they can use themselves even with the generous 50% adjusted gross income limitation and 15 year carryover. That’s where syndication comes in.
A year or so ago, thanks to all I have written about conservation easements, I received a call from someone who was promoting the syndication of conservation easements. In order for it to work I figured that one of three things had to be going on. There was fast and loose playing with Code Section 704, which concerns how you allocate income and losses among partners, property was being acquired from very dumb people or they were, you know, fibbing about the valuation. I think the proportions may vary, but that the third element, the valuations, tends to predominate. At least that is what the IRS is implying.
Tax Court Sustains IRS Strict Interpretation Of Charitable Acknowledgement Rules
The problem with valuing conservation and facade easements is that they involve subtracting the value of something real and existing now from the value of something hypothetical, which can turn into something of a fantasy. The valuation of the facade easement in this case is more grounded in reality. There was a real development plan ready to roll until Mr. Berman stepped in front of the hypothetical wrecking ball. It would be interesting to dig into it further, but at this point, I really don’t have enough information. My guess is the appraiser kind of underestimated the hurdles and risks including the obvious one that the Landmark Preservation Commission might, as they did, rule in favor of preservation.
A Very Cinema-graphic Passage
Off and on, I have been reading The Earth Is Weeping - The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West by Peter Cozzens. It is, of course, a very sad story,...