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, […]
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 […]
As high-profile energy industry investor Morris Zuckerman can attest, failure to pay taxes on money earned through energy production can result in serious criminal tax evasion or fraud charges. The Zuckerman case is a complicated one, involving a number of years and myriad investments on behalf of his Manhattan-based M.E. […]
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 […]
Everyone has heard of notorious U.S. mobster Al Capone. But few may realize that it wasn’t his many crimes committed as a mob boss that landed him in federal prison – it was tax evasion. For years, state and federal prosecutors tried to charge and convict Capone for various crimes […]
The Internal Revenue Service is much more than just the federal agency that collects taxes. It has broad power to investigate individuals and businesses for evidence of potential tax crimes like fraud or evasion involving tax preparation, bankruptcy, banking, gaming, health care, underreporting, employment taxes, identity theft, money laundering, tax […]
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 […]