Criminals Mine Data from Social Media Sites to Prey on Grandparents Have you heard of this recent scam? Criminals scour publicly available data on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Then, they locate a vulnerable relative — generally a grandparent — and...
Consulting Fees Paid to C Corporation Shareholders Were Disguised Dividends The 7th Cir. affirmed Tax Court disallowance of a C corporation deduction of consulting fees paid to corporations entities owned by its shareholders. The Court agreed with the IRS that the...
US Tax Court the ports collection agency tactic of filing IRS form 1099-C for cancellation of indebtedness income. One technique used by many collection agencies is to threaten a debtor that if they do not make a payment the debt will be reported as “canceled”. This...
Loans to Inject Capital into a C Corp When you borrow to inject capital into your own C corporation (or buy shares in a closely held C corp), the related interest expense falls into the investment interest category, regardless how active you are in the business. It...
Employment laws usually favor employees. This is especially true in dealing with overtime. Employees are presumably “non-exempt” and get overtime pay for working more than 40 hours in a single work week. The pay rate for overtime work must be at least 1.5 times the...
Navigating the IRS bureaucracy can be challenging for many taxpayers. The agency processes more than 141 million individual income tax returns annually and deals with a constantly changing Internal Revenue Code. There were approximately 4,430 changes to the tax code...
The IRS has a 3 year statute of limitations to conduct an audit. This can be extended to 6 years for the under-reporting more than 25% of gross income. In an attempt to extend the statute of limitations, a taxpayer that correctly reported gross income, but overstated...
The IRS keeps hiring “Revenue Agents” (the IRS term for Auditor). In the last few years, there has been a massive increase of auditors for Large Businesses (the is is called the LB&I – Large Business and International group). Now the IRS is going after Small...
US Tax Court – Interesting and Different Most people have not heard of the US Tax Court. It was founded in 1969 and is the only Court that will hear tax case prior to payment of tax. It has strict rules – you must file within 90 days of the date of an IRS Notice of...
Engineers Going to Jail – Not Paying Employment Taxes In U.S. v. DeMuro the Federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction of husband and wife engineers for the failure to pay employment taxes. The business owners failed to pay $500k in taxes and...