No one wants to pay taxes. But some people seek creative approaches to lower the amount that they owe. The problem is that many cross the fine line that separates tax avoidance and tax fraud. When does nonpayment or underpayment of a tax bill become criminal? To start this discussion, […]
Category: Tax Evasion
Let’s continue the discussion of tax inversion transactions that we began in a post last week. As we noted, transactions by which a U.S. company acquires a partner abroad and avoids U.S. taxes by reincorporating have attracted increasing attention from federal regulators. Last spring, the Treasury Department put into effect […]
Litigated cases – involving tax or any other subject – can take a long time to unfold. In this post, we will update you on a long-running Texas case involving tax fraud allegations. The case grew out of a federal investigation into offshore tax shelters set up by two brothers, […]
“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is a curious expression. It is an idiomatic way of expressing a sense of inevitability. The idea is that when one event in a linked-sequence happens, it’s just a matter of time before the next one follows. This appears to be what’s happening […]
Let’s resume our discussion of the closely watched tax evasion case involving Lionel Messi, the famed soccer star. As we noted in part 1, Messi contends he signed tax returns and contracts without really knowing the contents. He told the Spanish court that he did so because he trusted his […]
Soccer star Lionel Messi is one of the most celebrated athletes in the world, with an income to match. His position on the field is forward, not defender or goalie. But he now finds himself playing defense against criminal tax-evasion charges in Spain. In this two-part post, we will take […]
Millions of U.S. taxpayers are scrambling this weekend to get their taxes filed. The filing deadline is April 18 in Texas and most of the rest of the country. (Taxpayers in two New England states get an extra day because of a holiday called Patriot Day.) If you live abroad, […]
For the last few years, more and more U.S. citizens and green card holders have chosen to give up their passports rather than comply with increasingly burdensome offshore account reporting requirements. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), in particular, has become a major burden for many expatriates. We wrote […]
Do you really have to report illegal income to the IRS? Yes, it’s counter-intuitive. But the answer is yes. Of course, compliance with this requirement is not common. But some taxpayers do choose to report income from illegal activities. As we will explain in this post, one reason for doing […]
In the first part of this post, we began discussing the issue of underreported income. We noted that the IRS has a program that automatically sends out notices to taxpayers when information from other sources indicates that income may be underreported on a tax return. In this part of the […]