The tax code allows for many different types of deductions, including home mortgage interest, charitable contributions and many more. All of these deductions seek, in various ways, to encourage some form of desirable social activity. What about deductions for taking care of pets? Are there circumstances in which a deduction […]
Category: Tax Controversy
Opinions on gambling run the gamut. Some say it’s not gambling if you don’t lose. Others say that gambling usually involves getting nothing for something. Regardless of how you view it, however, gambling has tax implications. In the first part of this post, we discussed the tax aspects of fantasy […]
In the first part of this two-part post, we began discussing a few of the ways in which the different approach that the Millennial generation tends to take to tax compliance compared to other generational cohorts. We noted, for example, that Millennials tend to have a lot of concerns about […]
In Texas and across the country, the “Friday night lights” are back on. Colleges and the NFL have kicked off new seasons as well, as football again takes center stage in many people’s leisure activities. Of course, football-following fever goes way beyond going to a stadium or watching games on […]
Let’s continue the discussion we began last week of the impact of marital status on taxes. In the first part of the post, we noted that married people don’t necessarily get better tax treatment than unmarried people. For example, an unmarried couple can come off better than a married couple […]
About a year ago, we devoted a post to the impact of marriage on taxes. In that post, we asked whether there really is a “marriage penalty,” by which married couples may end up paying more in federal income tax than they would have if they had filed separately. We […]
In a junior-high civics class, the roles seem so settled. The legislative branch makes laws, the executive branch enforces them and the judicial branch interprets them. n practice of course, the interactions of the branches of government are often not so clear. Consider, for example, the current controversy about new […]
For U.S. taxpayers who work abroad, keeping on the right side of regulations poses ongoing headaches and challenges. Some American expatriates have given up their U.S. passports in response. Others have found foreign banks unwilling to deal with them, due to concerns about the compliance burdens of the Foreign Account […]
Self-employed workers have tax compliance challenges that other taxpayers do not. The underlying reason for this fairly simple: workers who are considered self-employed for tax purposes have to pay their Social Security and Medicare taxes. You don’t have an employer withholding and paying it for you, but instead have to […]
The so-called “Panama Papers” have continued to spell trouble not only for the Panamanian law firm alleged to have created illegal tax havens for clients to shield assets from American tax liability, but also for the countless law-abiding expatriates, foreign nationals and U.S. citizens with international banking accounts. The scandal […]