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When Taxing Social Security, What is Social Security?
Most retired people, and many not-yet retired people know that Social Security benefits are subject to federal income taxation. Describing the principle in simple terms is challenging, because the computation of how much of a taxpayer’s social...
How Not to Claim a Casualty Loss Deduction
The experience of the taxpayer in Beach v. Comr., T.C. Summ. Op. 2012-81, demonstrates how easy it is for a taxpayer to make errors when filing a federal income tax return. Compounding the situation was an error made by the IRS. The taxpayer owns a...
Sometimes When It Comes to Tax Violations, Voters Get It Right
Indeed, sometimes voters get it right but too often it takes way too long. This was demonstrated recently in the case of Philip Lewis Hart, a member of the Idaho legislature. Hart by profession is a structural engineer, he happens to think that the...
Tax Cheating and Tax Complexity
Late last week I received a press release describing a new book, Tax Cheating: Illegal – But Is It Immoral?, written by Donald Morris, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Illinois Springfield, a CPA, a certified fraud examiner...
The Futility of Tax Incentives
For many years reaching back to long before MauledAgain existed, and in many postings on that blog, I have rejected the use of tax law to accomplish indirectly what should be handled directly by government agencies other than the IRS and state...
Tax Myths, Tax Lies, and Tax Twisting
For me, the difference between a myth and a lie is that the folks believing in the former don’t know any better and those spreading the latter surely do. In between is the twisting, which can reflect ignorance but also can be the consequence of...
Can A Zero Congress Persist Forever?
Late last week, as reported in this Philadelphia Inquirer story and elsewhere, leaders of the Congressional majority decided to defer consideration of the many tax issues confronting the nation until after the election. At a minimum, 2010 will be 90...
If At First It Doesn’t Work, Try, Try, Try Again
Not much is worse than a failed attempt at a resolving a problem being offered as a solution to the very problem it failed to resolve. True, one ought not give up after one unsuccessfully try, but is there not some limit to the pursuit of futility?...
An Exercise in Futility?
The other day, a distant cousin – distant both geographically and in terms of degree of relationship, something on the order of fifth cousin – sent me The Best of All Possible Americas, a posting on The Smirking Chimp, a blog with which I was not...
The Internet, Virtual Meetings, and Taxation
A recent decision, Foundation of Human Understanding v. U.S., No. 2009-5129 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 16, 2010), demonstrates the continuing difficulties encountered by tax administrators and judges schooled in pre-digital days and caught in a pre-digital...
Structuring Introduction to Taxation of Business Entities: Part XVIII
As the course winds down, the transactions that mark the end of an entity’s existence take center stage. The word liquidation presents almost as much ambiguity in the corporate liquidation context as it does with respect to partnership liquidating...
Structuring Introduction to Taxation of Business Entities: Part X
Having worked through section 704(b) special allocations, the class turns to section 704(c). The good news is that section 704(c) is much easier to understand, at least at the level studied in the course, than section 704(b). Students had...
