Former IRS Commissioner Shulman, showing how bad he feels about politcal harassment under his watch.
The Worst Commissioner Ever returned to Washington yesterday to testify before a Senate committee on the IRS scandal. He bravely took responsibility for the targeting of disfavored political groups and apologized to the victims.
I certainly am not personally responsible for creating a list that had inappropriate criteria on it. And what I know, with the full facts that are out, is from the inspector general’s report, which doesn’t say that I’m responsible for that. With that said, this happened on my watch. And I very much regret that it happened on my watch.
In other words, I was just the boss, and you can’t blame me for what those crazy kids in Cincinnati do.
Lois Lerner, the head of the Internal Revenue Service office that targeted conservative groups, intends to invoke her constitutional right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions about the matter when questioned by a congressional committee Wednesday.
Ms. Lerner, director of the tax-exempt-organizations division at the IRS, notified the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform through her attorney that she wouldn’t answer questions on the matter, according to a committee spokesman.
When it comes to the Bill of Rights, better late than never.
On Friday, May 17, 2013, the Maryland Court of Appeals denied the comptroller’s motion for reconsideration in Comptroller v. Wynne, which struck down the state’s application of credits against pass through income from S corporations; however, the court stayed implementation of the ruling to allow the comptroller to petition the U.S. Supreme Court for certiorari.
With all the excitement over tax-exempt entities, it’s worth remembering that their returns — the 990 series — are due today for calendar-year filers. And if an organization fails to file 990s for three years, its exempt status lapses. Extensions are available, but they have to be filed today.
Late filing can be expensive. For small organizations, the penalty is $20 per day of late filing; for those with receipts over $1 million, its $100 per day. That adds up fast.
So let’s get started with this morning’s IRS Scandal news. The TIGTA report whose imminent release triggered the IRS announcement of the scandal last Friday came out yesterday. I covered it in a post last night. Other coverage:
It is no secret. This may hurt my libertarian credentials, but I believe the U.S. Congress should pass the Marketplace Fairness Act. The tax system is sound when built on a broad base and low rates. Broad base means you tax everything without regard to who is lobbying the legislature. It follows – and it really does follow – that the sales tax should be imposed on all personal consumption.
I can see a need for something like this, but I think it should be done by having a single point of compliance for sellers under a uniform set of rules, rather than subjecting internet sellers to the thousands of local tax systems. David minimizes the compliance burden. As somebody who makes a living off of the compliance burden, I can say with confidence that he is mistaken.
Steven Miller, acting head of the IRS since Doug Shulman left office, apparently hasn’t been any more honest than The Worst Commissioner Ever about IRS harassment of right-side political groups. AP reports:
Miller was first informed on May, 3, 2012, that applications for tax-exempt status by tea party groups were inappropriately singled out for extra scrutiny, the IRS said Monday.
At least twice after the briefing, Miller wrote letters to members of Congress to explain the process of reviewing applications for tax-exempt status without disclosing that tea party groups had been targeted.
We’re supposed to tell the truth when we file our returns. It’s not asking too much for them to return the favor.
The incompetence boggles the mind. It’s also bewildering how the Service could sit in front of GOP lawmakers and chastise them for underfunding tax enforcement when employees were using some of those supposedly precious funds to conduct a politically charged vendetta against conservative exempt organizations.
I think the perpetrators were quite competent in doing what they set out to do. The only incompetence was in getting caught. But he’s absolutely right that the agency’s poor-mouthing, including next week’s furloughs, will no longer convince anybody.
But it still disturbs me that no one in Washington really seemed to care until the behavior went public.
Many of us didn’t believe the IRS would really do something so outrageous. I had seen some of the questions that IRS was asking Tea Party outfits, and they seemed out of line, but I figured the IRS was being an equal-opportunity annoyance. That they did it politically is what is triggering the outrage.
Tax.com has moved. For reasons that elude me, Tax Analysts has apparently given up the handy Tax.com domain and moved their excellent group blog to a tab on their home page, Tax.org. I think that’s a mistake, but it’s worth going out of your way to find it.
It’s Tuesday, so it’s Buzz Day at Robert D. Flach’s place.
Career Advice. Protip: Threatening to Kill Your Colleagues, Even in the Midst of a Brutal Busy Season, Is Never Cool(Going Concern). OK, I take it back. Mistakes were made. There was no threat intended in my overzealous pursuit of tax return excellence. It was just an administrative shortcut. OK, incompetent, but not evil. I vow to find out exactly what happened. If I threatened anyone, it was outrageous.
If the IRS hoped Friday’s “apology” for giving extra special attention to tax-exemption applications of right-side groups would settle things, they’re very disappointed this weekend. The Washington Post reports that the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration will soon issue a report saying Friday’s apologizer, IRS Director, Exempt Organizations, knew this was going on in 2011. Meanwhile, in 2012 IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman was still testifying that IRS was not picking on the Tea Party.
So not only was the Shulman era at IRS grasping, incompetent and casually cruel, it was dishonest.
The documents, obtained by The Washington Post from a congressional aide with knowledge of the findings, show that the IRS field office in charge of evaluating applications for tax-exempt status decided to focus on groups making statements that “criticize how the country is being run” and those that were involved in educating Americans “on the Constitution and Bill of Rights.”
Yes, we sure need to keep an eye on those wingnuts who want to educate people on the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Dangerous lunatics, they are!
There is so much blog coverage of this that I won’t even try to round it all up. A few links from our blogroll:
The report doesn’t shay whether or not Shulman was informed about the Tea Party questioning, but it does show the IRS’s chief counsel was. It’s standard procedure for the counsel and commissioner to discuss this sort of thing before a Congressional hearing.
If so, The Worst Commissioner Ever can only plead incompetence instead of lying to Congress.
Nina Olson, IRS Taxpayer Advocate, has an article in Tax Analysts (via the TaxProf) affirming her support for taxpayer regulation. Ms. Olson has done much good work as Taxpayer Advocate, but her support for increased preparer regulation is economically uninformed and hopelessly wrongheaded.
I’d like to report a hijacking. It looks like somebody at Tax Analysts forgot to renew their ownership of the tax.com domain name. Going there this morning gets this:
Tax.com is (has been?) home to the great group blog featuring, among others, David Brunori, Christopher Bergin, David Cay Johnston, Martin Sullivan, Cara Griffith and Clint Stretch. I hope this is only a temporary hijacking.
Former IRS Commissioner Shulman, showing how much he cares about IRS political integrity.
Confession: I never took seriously complaints that the IRS was harassing Tea Party organizations who filed for tax-exempt status. It didn’t seem impossible, but the IRS can be difficult to anybody, regardless of political affiliation. Don’t be paranoid!
In a practice that conservatives complained about during the 2012 election campaign, organizations that used the words “patriots” or “Tea Party” in their tax-exempt status filings were flagged by the IRS for further review.
Lois Lerner, director of the IRS tax-exempt office, said the practice “was absolutely incorrect and it was inappropriate.”
Speaking at an American Bar Association conference in Washington, Lerner said, “We would like to apologize for that.”
Oh, but don’t worry:
Lerner said the screening process was “absolutely not” influenced by anyone in the Obama administration.
All righty, then. Not even the senior administration official who said this about the president of another exempt organization:
“President [Michael] Crowe and the Board of Regents will soon learn all about being audited by the IRS.”
The tone of any organization is set at the top. Unwittingly or not, the President’s statement endorsed IRS harassment of his opponents in a Chicago-style wink-nudge kind of way. As it’s safe to assume that IRS employees overwhelmingly voted for the President, a hint might have been all that was needed.
His subordinate IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman wasn’t worried about it. In March 2012 The Worst Commissioner Ever testified:
The Internal Revenue Service is not making it harder for tea party groups to attain tax-exempt status because of their political views, the agency’s chief told Congress on Thursday.
…
“As you know, we pride ourselves on being a non-political, non-partisan organization,” Shulman said.
Many tea party groups are applying under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which grants tax-exempt status as long as organizations are not primarily involved in activity that could influence an election. That determination is up to the IRS.
“There’s absolutely no targeting. This is the kind of back and forth that happens to people” who apply for tax-exempt status, Shulman said.
In Washingtonspeak, that’s “inoperative.” Yet whatever “mistakes were made,” they don’t bother the IRS enough to fire anybody, as far as anybody knows. This is an organization that will fire employees for peeking at movie star tax returns. But political harassment — well, mistakes were made.
Mistakes were made initially, but they were in no way due to any political or partisan rationale.
Right. Because “patriot” and “Tea Party” have no political connotations. Exemption applications with those names were beaten to death just by some amazing coincidence.
The next time some poor schmuck is on trial for not reporting income, he should try saying that his underreporting of taxes “was in no way due to any tax avoidance rationale,” just to see how it works.
So I stand corrected. I’ll remember now paranoia about the IRS is perfectly justified. This is a big deal, and it should result in firings. If it’s a firing offence to look at a starlet’s 1040, it should at least be as serious to use the power of the IRS to pick on disfavored political groups.
The TaxProf of course has an excellent roundup. And the right side blog world is all over this:
Politicians advance plan to allow politicians to give more tax money to private businesses. From TheGazette.com:
Iowa communities would be able to designate special 25-acre development zones and use a share of sales tax and hotel-motel tax revenues to assist private projects of at least $10 million under legislation that’s getting bipartisan support.
House File 641 would establish reinvestment districts designed to spur development of “big ideas,” said Sen. Matt McCoy, D-Des Moines, who led a Senate Ways and Means subcommittee that revamped the bill representatives approved 87-9 last month.
This is, of course, an awful idea. Politicians are notoriously bad at allocating investment capital, and they tend to make sure it goes to their cronies and contributors. But when the state’s Governor, a member of the purported small government party, does an end-zone dance over a giant federal subsidy to a private utility controlled by a billionaire, the battlefield is left to the crony capitalists. The House version of HF 641 passed 87-9.
New York State’s comptroller says giving $2.8 billion in tax breaks over five years added more than a million jobs, which would be great news except that the state lost jobs.
I’m confident Iowa’s job-creating tax breaks work just as well.
For capital gains, the current law is already out-of-step with international standards. After the fiscal cliff, combined state and federal capital gains rates increased from 19.1 percent to 28 percent. This is more than 10 percentage points higher than the international average. One suggestion, of course, is to tax capital gains at the rate at the 1986 rate of 28 percent. This would push America’s average combined federal and state capital gains rate to more than 35 percent, more than double the international average.
A chance traffic stop on I-75 in Lee County uncovers a massive tax fraud scheme. Deputies say the woman accused used her job to steal personal information – even stealing from people who were dead.
Thursday, 23-year-old Tequila Gordon was sitting in the Lee County Jail. Her bond was set at $72,000.
Prosecutors say she worked at liberty tax services in 2009 and stole personal information from dozens of people.
I would think having a first name of “Tequila” would make getting a good job challenging. It won’t be any easier now.
Search for the Tax Fairy leads to federal prison. The Tax Fairy, in the imagination of believers, appears in the form of magical legal maneuvers that make your taxes all go away. Your drinking buddies may even claim to have seen it, or that their tax guy knows her.
It can hurt when you find that there is no Tax Fairy. It must hurt for one South Dakota surgeon. From RapidCityJournal.com:
Friends and family described Dr. Edward Picardi as a compassionate, highly skilled surgeon, but the accolades failed to spare the doctor a five-year prison sentence for income tax evasion on Tuesday.
Despite the good the Sturgis man was proclaimed to have done in his life, Picardi, 56, is the same man a federal jury convicted of 13 felonies last October, U.S. Chief District Judge Jeffrey Viken said when he sentenced the doctor.
Picardi was charged with income tax evasion after an exhaustive federal investigation of his financial practices spanning 10 years from 1999 through 2009. He used an elaborate network of dummy corporations and several foreign banks to divert thousands of dollars in income.
The indictment says the scheme was hatched with the aid of a Maryland attorney who set up a phony employee leasing scheme to suck taxable income to shell companies, which the surgeon tapped for cash as needed. This worked fine, until one day it didn’t, and now it’s a five-year unpaid vacation, plus tax, interest and penalties.
There is no Tax Fairy.
Jana Luttenegger, Disclaiming an Inheritance (Davis Brown Tax Law Blog). Sometimes it’s better estate planning to turn down an inheritance and let it go to your kids or some other beneficiary. But you have to do it right:
Most importantly, the disclaimer must be made before you accept any benefit in the gift, and it must be an unqualified disclaimer. (No, you can’t have a party at the house and then decide you don’t want it.) Once the disclaimer is made, it is irrevocable — you can’t change your mind. If you properly disclaim, the property will pass as if you predeceased (you do not get to direct where the property goes).
The looming debate over the federal debt limit is a depressing reminder that we’re living in the Age of the Manufactured Crisis. And it encourages a sort of political nostalgia – a yearning for that bygone era when tough lawmakers made the tough decisions that kept federal debt at manageable levels. Well, sorry to tell you, but there were never any fiscal heroes.
Just politicians who show by their actions that they are happy to spend us to Greece.
Jason Dinesen, Same-Sex Marriage, Community Property, And Multi-State Income — Part 1. ”Indeed, some of the most complicated tax returns I’ve ever prepared have been for same-sex couples that moved from California (a community property state) to Iowa (not a community property state) during the middle of the year.”
Think of it as the ballpark program you pick up before a baseball game. You can watch the game without it, but it is much more fun if you can keep score and know a little something about who plays for the visiting team.
Except much less interesting than baseball, and the players are uglier and less skilled.
Lauryn Hill’s parents are 150 years old! The singer received a three-month prison sentence yesterday for failing to file tax returns, but the New Jersey native still may struggle with math, according to the reliable source of tax news, TMZ.com:
“I was put into a system I didn’t know the nature of. … I’m a child of former slaves. I got into an economic paradigm and had that imposed on me,” Hill said.
She continued, “I sold 50 million units … now I’m up here paying a tax debt. If that’s not likened to slavery, I don’t know what is.”
As slavery was eliminated nearly 150 years ago with the passage of the 13th Amendment, Ms. Hill either has difficulty with arithmetic or remarkable parents. The slavery analogy is interesting. So if tax is slavery, is President Obama the chief slave driver? The IRS Commissioner? Can we be sold down the river? To who?
Ideas that would work perfectly well in song lyrics can sound so wrong in court. The artist describes feelings, impressionistically. It’s in no way an excuse or justification. But sometimes artists/politicos use court as a forum for expression without any expectation that it will advance their legal cause. One can intelligently and consciously eschew persuasion and victory.
Perhaps. Still, sometimes celebrities just say strange things.
A reporter for a nationally prominent publication has contacted me to help him get in touch with people who have gone through one of the OVDI/P programs to discuss their experiences and thoughts about the programs. If you are interested and/or willing to do that, please contact me at jack@tjtaxlaw.com and I will put you in touch with the reporter.
So maybe it’s a chance for those of you who’ve been put through the ringer for a foot-fault violation to get a little justice.
The opposite of a sales tax holiday: Retailer Target Jumps The Gun On Sales Tax (TaxGrrrl). A South Carolina Target store probably made few friends when it started charging a higher sales tax rate a month early.
Are you irritable? Sleeping less? Impatient with your friends? Putting on weight? Thinking about divorce? Yes? Sorry to hear, you must be going through a stressful time.
Oh, wait, are you an American? Yes?! Whew, you’re behaving normally then. If you were to read this AICPA press release, you might be inclined to believe that your take home pay being 2% lower than last year would have been the cause of all those things…
New U.K. film tax credit indictments. It appears that the Brits are slowly moving towards the Iowa approach of jailing filmmakers instead of subsidizing them. Ic.Scotland.co.uk reports:
Five people are to be charged in connection with a film industry tax relief fraud which cost the public purse around £125 million, the Crown Prosecution Service said.
The group allegedly abused a tax relief that allows investors in the British film industry to offset losses against other tax liabilities in order to cheat the public revenue.
“Around £125 million” translates to around $194 million. And in Iowa film producers are serving time for stealing merely single digits of millions. It just goes to show what you can accomplish with a national effort.
Boo. House bill would give IRS authority to regulate tax pros(Kay Bell) The power grabbers at IRS and their buddies at the national franchise tax prep firms have been thwarted by the courts. Now they are using their congresscritter friends to put in the fix.
Kay sadly falls for it:
The quality independent tax professionals are following tax law changes, staying up to date and providing their clients with reliable tax services. Down the street, however, an inept preparer is undercutting their prices and mucking up the system for all of us — the IRS, tax pros and taxpayers alike.
The IRS can’t regulate anybody into competency. They can make people pass a “competency” test that really is a literacy test. They can make people pay for CPE. But they can’t make anybody competent who wouldn’t be otherwise. What they can do is drive little preparers out of the business with nagging paperwork, red tape and hassles that the big boys can just assign to their compliance departments, and, when necessary, to their lobbyists. This reduces the supply of preparers, increasing the cost of preparation for taxpayers.
The real problem with tax errors isn’t preparers; it’s the horrendous tax law and the inept legislators who make it happen.
In a 2011 paper published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Veronique de Rugy and Adam Thierer recommended “an ‘origin-based’ sourcing rule for any states seeking to impose sales tax collection obligations on interstate vendors.” Under that rule, which mirrors what happens when you buy something while visiting another state, each business collects sales tax on behalf of the state where it is based, no matter where the customer happens to be.
The beauty of this approach is that it treats all retailers equally, eliminates the daunting challenge of dealing with many different taxing authorities, and respects state policy choices while encouraging tax competition between jurisdictions. Evidently the idea makes too much sense for Congress to consider.
That would motivate online sellers to locate in low tax jurisdictions, which is why congresscritters from high-tax places will never allow it to happen.
The tax, which took effect Jan. 1, applies to the “net investment income” of married joint filers who have more than $250,000 of income (or $200,000 for singles). Only investment income—such as dividends, interest and capital gains—above the thresholds is taxed. The rate is a flat 3.8% in addition to other taxes owed.
“Affluent investors who ignore this tax will be in for a total shock next April 15,” says David Lifson, a certified public accountant specializing in tax at Crowe Horwath in New York. Such income is typically not subject to withholding, and people won’t be factoring it into their estimated taxes. Lower-bracket taxpayers who receive a windfall large enough to owe the tax will also be in for a surprise.
This tax is shockingly complex, and it will surprise a lot of taxpayers next April.
Feds sue over Des Moines utility tax (Des Moines Register). Des Moines lost a long legal battle over its “utility tax” on electric bills. Now the federal government is after the city:
Federal prosecutors acting on behalf of the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs sued the city of Des Moines and MidAmerican Energy Co. on Friday, alleging that the city’s longstanding surcharge on gas and electric customers in Des Moines constitutes an illegal tax when levied against Uncle Sam.
When a taxpayer wins a jackpot, the casino gives them the W-2G for the win at that time. It’s up to the taxpayer to keep the W-2G safe and bring it into me, or their preparer, when their taxes are done. What happens to the W-2G? It gets shoved into a purse or pocket, thrown in the glove compartment or on the desk at home or thrown in the trash by accident.
I support keeping the deduction for acquisition debt mortgage interest on one’s primary personal residence, and the deduction for real estate taxes on the same primary personal residence, not to encourage home ownership, but as a form of “geographical equalization”.
In other words, he wants to help out people who live in places where houses cost more. I think that’s misguided, as it also encourages people who live in low-cost locales like Des Moines to build palaces with help from the taxman.
Russ Fox, 1700 Miles and a 7% Difference. Joe Mauer of the Minnesota Twins tries to avoid Minnesota residency for low-tax Florida. It went about as well as this season will for the Florida Marlins (or the Twins, for that matter).
Paul Neiffer, Don’t Forget Your Retirement Plan. “I was talking with a new farm client the other day about his estate plan and what struck me the most was not how much farm land value he had accumulated but rather the amount he had tucked away into his retirement plans.”
Get some competent advice about how to handle the past years. If the advice is OVDI, then stand up and walk away, swearing the mightiest oaths that a drunken sailor could swear.
Perhaps the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative has somehow failed to gain the confidence of the tax bar?
Our politicians have tried to do too much through the tax law. And that has created a complicated mess of winners and losers that makes the task of trying to reform it, even to some level of sensible, a daunting one.The poster child for this mess is the Earned Income Tax Credit. Like it or not, the EITC is welfare administered through the tax system. Do we really want our tax system to do that?
The tax law works best if it is seen solely as a tool to finance the government. Much of its hideous complexity comes from using it is the Swiss Army Knife of public policy. As you add more gadgets it becomes less useful at being a knife.
Mr. Bergin isn’t afraid to mention the elephant in the room:
And there is another huge problem. The EITC program leaks like a sieve. More bluntly and honestly stated, well-intentioned as it may be, the EITC has been corrupted. Don’t take my word for it. Recently, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration released a report stating that up to one-quarter of EITC payments made in fiscal 2012 were improper. How much does that represent? Try $13.6 billion. In one year. Using a ten-year budget window, that’s $136 billion, and that’s just thetainted stuff.
Supporters say the EITC is a program that “works.” Can you say that something “works” when it sprays billions to thieves every year?
Read the whole thing.
Fairness:
But the compliance costs imposed by the Marketplace Fairness Act would place smaller upstarts at a distinct disadvantage, which is, I suspect, one reason that market incumbents such as Amazon support the tax. The real cost of taxes is not the revenue out the door to the taxman; it’s the revenue out to the door to the taxman plus all of the costs involved in complying with the tax code.
Few of the commentators I’ve read have asked themselves what happens to the money after the software has collected the money. Do the sales tax fairies simply whisk it off to the nice folks at the state tax department?
Sadly, no. Rather, as an SBA guidebook for small businesses points out, you have to file a tax return with each and every locality for which you have collected tax. The bill streamlines this a bit, but you’ve still got to keep 50 states’ worth of records and file 40-odd states worth of returns.
…
For Amazon—the actual target of these laws—this is trivial. Its staff of crack accountants can probably roll these things out before their Monday-morning coffee break. For a small vendor, however, that’s a whole lot of paperwork.
Speaking as a cracked accountant, I am sure that while Amazon can handle its sales tax burden, it is far from trivial. It takes an expensive staff and a good organization with excellent systems in place to do reasonably well — and I expect they still get inexplicable notices from states quibbling over obscure tax issues. Good sales tax compliance functions are expensive, affordable only in a large organization. For some guy selling handmade N-scale boxcars out of his basement, it could be painfully expensive, if not ruinously so. Like any expanded regulation, requiring online sellers to collect Internet sales taxes inherently favors the big.
According to the Streamlined Sales Tax agreement, the definition of candy is a “preparation of sugar, honey, or other natural or artificial sweeteners in combination with chocolate, fruits, nuts or other ingredients or flavorings in the form of bars, drops, or pieces. ‘Candy’ shall not include any preparation containing flour and shall require no refrigeration.”
So pursuant to that definition, a sweet with flour is not candy, while a sweet without flour is. For example, a Hershey’s chocolate bar is candy, while a Twix bar is not. Ditto for Kit Kat bars. Makes sense, right? But what about Twizzlers? Seems a solid bet that licorice is candy, but it isn’t because flour is a top ingredient.
In the past when a client got too big a refund I would scold him/her and say that he/she was making an interest free loan to the government. While this is still true, I do not scold any more, considering the pitiful amount of interest being paid on savings account today.
I’m not a big fan of excess withholding, but it’s a lot easier for a client to deal with a refund that’s too big than a tax bill they can’t pay.
Increasingly, I hear stories of relatively wealthy people contemplating moving to states that do not tax their assets upon death. These are not people with private jets or suites at Yankee Stadium. They are just people who had the good fortune to do better financially than most. Do New Jersey or Maryland or the other states with pretty onerous estate taxes really want their elderly wealthy to move?
While motivations for moving are complicated, taxes are one of them. Why do the same people who want higher cigarette taxes to discourage smoking believe that higher income and estate taxes don’t also affect behavior?
Winston Churchill said that Americans can be counted on to do the right thing, after we have exhausted all other possibilities. He might have added that we usually start with the least direct and most complex approach. So it is with the energy tax policy expressed in President Obama’s FY 2014 budget.
I like this sentence: “By their nature, tax credits add complexity to the law and often reward behavior that would occur even without the credits.”
So far two clients have contacted me to report an issue – one with a 2011 refund andone with a 2012 refund. In both cases the refund was not directly deposited to the requested account. Instead it was applied to the subsequent year’s estimated tax. It was as if the taxpayer, or I, had entered the full amount of the refund on Line 75, although we clearly did not.
This isn’t a problem I have seen. Robert famously doesn’t e-file his returns. I wonder if it’s a simple keypunch error at the service center.
The legal business must really be getting tough, if lawyers have to resort to the lamest lame tax fraud scheme out there. A Monroe, Louisiana attorney named Francis Broussard has pleaded guilty to attempting to claim over $9 million through the “1099-OID” fraud. From thenewsstar.com:
According to the Stipulated Factual Basis in the plea agreement, Broussard, who has been licensed to practice law in Louisiana since 1986, had his accountant prepare his 2005 through 2007 tax returns, but the defendant never filed them. Broussard did present the documents to various financial institutions in efforts to obtain personal loans and other types of financing. In 2009, the defendant went to a different tax preparer to have his personal tax returns prepared for 2005 through 2008. The defendant brought already prepared federal tax returns along with a separate piece of paper with a set of numbers on it. The defendant instructed the preparer to use the set of numbers on Forms 1099-Original Issue Discount (OID) and on the Schedule B, Interest Income section of the form. The defendant’s fraudulent claim is based on the OID interest income.
The 1099-OID scheme is, to the extent it is coherent at all, based on the idea that government has a big cash stash for each of us. They don’t want us to know about it, goes the theory, but we can tap into it if we just fill out the right tax forms. It’s not surprising that people fall for it — heck, we fall for big delusions every time we vote — but it is surprising that a lawyer would give such a preposterous scheme a try.
TaxProf, TIGTA: IRS Fails to Comply With Mandated Reduction in Improper Payments — 25% EITC Fraud Costs $14 Billion/Year. The earned income tax credit is a fraud magnet because it is “refundable” — if it exceeds your tax for the year, the IRS writes you a check. That makes it a welfare program run through the tax system. EIC advocates say it is a critical help for struggling families, but when that much is stolen from the program in a year, you have to think there is a better way.
24 current and former employees of the Internal Revenue Service have been charged for crimes relating to fraudulently obtaining more than $250,000 in government benefits. Thirteen of the current and former IRS employees have been charged federally with making false statements to obtain unemployment insurance payments, food stamps, welfare, and housing vouchers. All thirteen, individually charged in separate indictments, are alleged to have falsely stated that they were unemployed while applying for or recertifying those government benefits.
They may have been right about being unemployed, just wrong about the timing.
The headline producing data in the report was that revenue loss – about $181 billion – from corporate tax expenditures in 2011 was “approximately the same size as the amount of corporate income tax revenue the federal government collected that year.” That makes a headline grabber; here would be my version: “Corporations Got More in Tax Breaks Than They Paid in Taxes, Government Says.”
It’s almost like the tax exists only so the politicians can carve loopholes for their friends.
With less than three weeks left in filing season, the US Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has denied the IRS attempt to overturn the injunction against their preparer regulation scheme. From the Wall Street Journal Total Return blog:
This doesn’t mean the IRS has permanently lost its case, but it does mean that the IRS cannot move forward with its power grab unless and until it convinces the appeals court that it has the authority to regulate preparers.
Meanwhile, filing season continues, with no evidence that taxpayers have been harmed by the availability of preparers who haven’t passed an IRS open-book exam on Publication 17.
Iowa preparer indicted – for helping clients report too much income. From KCRG.com (my emphasis):
Keith Rath, of Shellsburg, was arrested last week by IRS agents after a grand jury indicted him on eight counts of aiding in the preparation and presentation of a false tax return.
The indictment says that on eight occasions over the years 2008, 2009 and 2010, Rath helped clients falsely claim thousands of dollars in business income that he knew they did not earn.
Mr. Rath has pleaded not guilty.
You might wonder why anyone would claim business income they didn’t earn. The answer, of course, would be to claim refundable earned income tax credits. A taxpayer with no “earned income” is ineligible for the credit. The EITC is “refundable,” which means that when there is the credit exceeds the computed tax, the IRS will send you a check for the difference. By reporting imaginary Schedule C income, taxpayers can (illegally) increase their refund check.
In fact, the OECD itself recently issued a report – known as the BEPS report – on how these techniques create base erosion and profit shifting. The problem is so serious, according to the report, “What is at stake is the integrity of the corporate income tax.”
The “integrity of the corporate income tax” is in the third aisle next to the chastity of the bordello.
Film tax credit scams are big news in the U.K. right now. An Irish actress, Aoife Madden, yesterday received a 54-month sentence in her role in scamming a U.K. film tax credit scheme. Irish Times reports:
The group successfully claimed £1.5 million in film tax breaks after they said they intended to make a film titled Landscape of Lives with a £19 million budget, funded by Jordanian backers.
Once they were arrested two years ago, the five hurriedly produced a film called, ironically, Landscape of Lies for just £90,000, which went on to win a Silver Ace award from last year’s Las Vegas Film Festival.
The film, which starred former EastEnders actor Marc Bannerman and Andrea McClean, told the story of a former British soldier’s attempts to discover the truth behind his friend’s murder in an apparent mugging.
Before suspicions had been aroused, Madden’s London film company, Evolved Pictures, told revenue and customs that millions had been spent on Hollywood A-list actors and film crew when it lodged a value added tax repayment application for £1.48 million. It received more than £1 million.
Lost in the coverage is Iowa’s pioneering role in film tax credit scams. A little-known film producer from Minnesota came here and showed the Brits just how it’s done:
Take Iowa. A start-up called Polynation Pictures came looking for backing for a sci-fi flick so lame it would have embarrassed Ed Wood. With a financing scheme worthy of Max Bialystock, the con these folks pulled was nearly as inept as the film they made, but Iowa’s film office was too starry eyed to notice.
…
The $767,250 production Polynation Pictures proposed eventually came in at $3.7 million. This was achieved in part with preposterous expenses. Producers claimed they paid $1,350 to rent six orange road cones. The use of two 6-foot ladders supposedly cost the company $900 (a bargain, as Polynation claimed to have spent another $900 to rent a single 8-foot ladder). Among production necessities was a new Mercedes. The partners set up an array of separate companies and used them to bill themselves extravagantly for work supposedly done on the picture. These were presented to Iowa as “deferred payments”—to be paid if the movie made money (which the enterprise was sure to do when Iowa handed the tax credits over). The only thing missing was a staged rendition of “Springtime for Hitler.”
Polynation mastermind Wendy Weiner Runge received 10 years for her star turn in the film credit program.
The film credit program was touted as a way to make Iowa a leader in the film world. And, in a way, it did.
You might be interested in this interview with Ms. Madden about her role in the film, knowing what we know now. She said this:
This project has been a crazy but wonderful challenge!! I’ve always wanted to produce a feature, and have a number of projects in development, but this was the one I just wanted to lift off the page. I think the biggest challenge was sourcing finance, which is no surprise for an independent film company. We were extremely lucky to find international investors and lobby them to back the project, but this was a lengthy process and has always been a challenge.
A challenge, yes, but I’m not sure they turned out lucky.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Now that the courts have saved the IRS from itself by shutting down the misguided preparer regulation system, the Senate rides to the rescue to screw everything up again, Accounting Today reports:
The two leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have begun developing proposals for reforming the U.S. Tax Code, including giving the Internal Revenue Service the clear statutory authority to regulate tax preparers in case the IRS loses its appeal of a recent court case invalidating its Registered Tax Return Preparer regime.
The IRS can’t answer its phones. Its pockets are being picked to the tune of billions by semi-literate South Florida grifters. And the Senate thinks that preparers are the problem? Preparer regulation is a market-share enhancement program for the national franchise tax prep outfits; the rules were written by a former H&R Block CEO. If Senators Baucus and Hatch want to re-enact these anti-competitive and useless rules, it just shows who they really represent. (Via Going Concern).
Ceremonial cross of John Frum cargo cult, Tanna island, New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), 1967 (via Wikipedia)
Heresies of the Cargo Cult. When some remote societies encountered the industrial world in World War II, they had trouble grasping what they were seeing. Wikipedia explains:
Cargo cult activity in the Pacific region increased significantly during and immediately after World War II, when the residents of these regions observed the Japanese and American combatants bringing in large amounts of matériel. When the war ended, the military bases closed and the flow of goods and materials ceased. In an attempt to attract further deliveries of goods, followers of the cults engaged in ritualistic practices such as building crude imitation landing strips, aircraft and faux radio equipment out of bamboo or whatever materials they had at hand, and mimicking the behavior that they had observed of the military personnel operating there.
While it’s easy to mock an islander for building a refrigerator-like box in hopes of conjuring up an icy six-pack, cargo cult behavior also occurs in modern societies. Without describing it as such, tax historian Joseph Thorndike writes about the cargo cult of the 1950s, where modern policy wonks try to conjure up 1950s-style growth through a ritualistic process of duplicating tailfin-era totems. For example, Timothy Noah thinks the crushing stated top marginal rates of that era might help generate those Happy Days results. Mr. Thorndike sees problems with that approach:
We still don’t know if high statutory rates and (relatively) high average rates were a drag on growth. And we can’t know, because we also can’t know what growth might have been in a different tax climate.
Moreover, a range of nontax factors were probably more important in shaping growth patterns in the 1950s. In particular, the economic disruptions of World War II had left the United States in a uniquely dominant position; by one estimate, U.S. manufacturing output constituted 60 percent of the world’s total in 1950.
In other words, it takes more than a bamboo box to conjure up that beer.
After all, the tax system of the Eisenhower era was not a very good one: It paired notionally sky-high rates with a deeply flawed tax base and created distortions both coming and going.
I understand that progressives like Noah are fighting a different battle: They are trying to beat back the rate-cutting mania that often serves as a definition of tax reform these days. But I think we might take a lesson from the tax experts of the 1950s, who understood the problems bedeviling their own tax system. As economist Harold Groves said at the time, “The impression is widely shared that the Congress deliberately throws a high-rate scale to the public as a demagogic bone and then as deliberately allows escapes from taxes that makes these rates specious.”
Mr. Thorndike is more sympathetic to high rates than I ever will be. Doing taxes for a living, I see first-hand how high rates affect behavior, and I have no patience for academics who say otherwise. But he wisely notes that simply trying to recreate the totems of the 1950s, like high tax rates, misses all of the other things that put cold beer in the refrigerator. Same thing goes for other 1950s fetishes like tail fins, industrial unionism and defined benefit pension plans.
Former Pittsburgh Police Chief Nathan E. Harper has been indicted by a federal grand jury in Pittsburgh on charges of conspiracy and willful failure to file income tax returns, U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton announced today.
The five-count indictment named Harper, 60, of Pittsburgh.
According to the indictment, Harper was the chief of the city of Pittsburgh Police Department. From 2009 to 2012, he caused at least $70,628.92 in checks and cash received by the special events office of the department to be diverted to two accounts at the Greater Pittsburgh Police Federal Credit Union. Using Visa debit cards, Harper obtained more than $31,000 in ATM withdrawals and debit purchases, all for his personal benefit. Harper also failed to file federal tax returns for the years 2008 through 2011.
If he’s convicted, maybe the special events office can throw a little party for the occasion.
What could possibly go wrong? James Timothy Turner was convicted last week of masterminding a cunning plan. DothanEagle.com reports:
According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release, Turner was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the U.S., attempting to pay taxes with fictitious financial instruments, attempting to obstruct and impede the Internal Revenue Service, failing to file a 2009 federal income tax return and falsely testifying under oath in a bankruptcy proceeding.
The FBI began investigating Turner in 2010 after he and three other people sent packages to all 50 governors demanding they leave office.
Turner is the president of a group of what prosecutors called “sovereign citizens” known as the “Republic for the united States of America.”
Send “packages” to all of the governors telling them to resign? Well, at least they weren’t trying to hide what they were doing.
Turner toured the country in 2008 and 2009 teaching seminars that instructed attendees how to submit bonds to pay off tax debt.
According to prosecutors, these bonds were completely fictitious and often written for amounts in excess of $1 billion.
Silly man. Only the Federal Reserve can do that. Unless we’re talking about the $1 trillion magic coin…
So, for those tax professionals engaging in such transactions that they know violated a known legal duty, their conduct is illegal and unethical. For those transactions engaging in such transactions where they don’t know (perhaps are willfully ignorant) that the conduct is illegal (ultimately most of the b—-t tax shelters are found to be illegal), then at least the ethical issues arise. These are smart professionals, paid (supposedly) to predict what a court will do with the b—–t tax shelter. Yet, in the prominent civil cases that swat down b—–t tax shelters, they fail miserably in their predictions.
IRS waives late payment penalties for returns containing delayed forms. If you can’t file or pay taxes on time, it’s always better to extend your return while you round up the information or the cash. The penalty for filing a late unextended return is 5%, plus an additional 5% for every additional month of late filing. The penalty for paying late on a timely extended return, in contrast, is only 1/2%, plus 1/2% per additional month.
While penalties will be waived, the IRS will charge interest on amounts paid after the deadline.
The notice has a complete list of forms that allow taxpayers to qualify for the late payment exception. The most commonly-seen ones are probably Form 4562, for depreciable assets and the section 179 deduction, and Form 8582 for passive activities.
By issuing this notice early, the IRS has also given taxpayers a planning opportunity. If you have a big balance due on April 15, and you have one of the qualifying forms, you now are eligible for what amounts to a low-interest loan for up to six months, until the October 15 extension deadline. Many taxpayers accelerated income into 2012 to beat the 2013 tax hikes, and they loan might come in handy. The current IRS interest rates:
three (3) percent for underpayments;
five (5) percent for large corporate underpayments
But if you have the cash, you probably want to pay up on April 15. There aren’t many places left where you can get a 3% after-tax return on your money for six months.
David Cay Johnston, Level Playing Fields Under Attack. (Tax.com). Because we don’t want Wal-Mart to be at the mercy of some guy selling stuff from his basement.
The road not taken. I left a national accounting firm to start a new firm. A (purported) alumna of the same firm took a somewhat different path. (Going Concern)
Joe Kristan writes the Tax Update items, and any opinions expressed or implied are not necessarily shared by anyone else at Roth & Company, P.C. Address questions or comments on Tax Updates to
Disclaimer
The items included in the Tax Update Blog are informational only and are not meant as tax advice. Consult with your tax advisor to determine how any item applies to your situation.
New U.K. film tax credit indictments. It appears that the Brits are slowly moving towards the Iowa approach of jailing filmmakers instead of subsidizing them. 
Joe Kristan writes the Tax Update items, and any opinions expressed or implied are not necessarily shared by anyone else at Roth & Company, P.C. Address questions or comments on Tax Updates to
