Someone has to fund Ukraine, might as well be you. =D
Taxes/IRS Make Me Want to Blow my Brains Out!
- Thread starter OSOBUCO
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Could be. She was in her late 20's or early 30's when I had the audit meeting. After 6 months of having to rewrite her audit on a weekly basis as I sent mail after mail pointing out tax law on the items she had disallowed she may very well have looked like this.
At the end, when the total had gone from $12,000 down to $30, I went to the local IRS office and asked to see her supervisor, handing him the first version and the latest.
Two weeks later, the IRS send me a letter saying that they had vacated the audit.
Again, thanks to the two IRS auditors I met, quite by chance, at Gorki's, who steered me on how to best deal with her.
sable', what a victory, but also what a terrible waste of time. How you can stand to read tax law defies imagination. Congratulations.
Let's just say that I was highly motivated. Also, there are publications regarding tax law for artists.
It's unfortunate how complex tax law has become, enough so that many resort to the assistance of accountants or services like turbotax. My wife and I are retired with pensions and IRA's, an uncomplicated financial existence, yet our return last year was 52 pages. There were forms I've never heard of before, nor was it easy to discern what role they played in my tax liability. I always thought Steve Forbes was on to something when he advocated for a federal tax form that could fit on a 3 x 5 card.
1. I'm a military retiree and have been on Social Security for five years. I thank all of you for continuing to pay your taxes on time.
2. One of the smart things I did 18 years ago when I stopped working for a company and started working for myself was find a good accountant to do my taxes. He got sick a couple of years later and sold his company to a larger company and I stayed with the new company. In 18 years, I have had to pay additional taxes maybe three times.
It's worth what I pay to have my taxes done (and the cost of the accountant is a deduction).
3. I've always thought it ironic that the federal politicians who are all rich and have accountants to make sure they take every loophole available are also the ones who vote to continually raise taxes while doing nothing to close the loopholes. These same politicians are also beholden to the "billionaires" for the cash donations to their re-election campaign funds (thereby selling their votes to the rich).
4. I'm in favor of the flat tax without loopholes. The best idea I can remember hearing was a flat 10% tax on anyone making over $50,000 a year with a flat 15% tax on anyone making over $250,000 a year.
2. One of the smart things I did 18 years ago when I stopped working for a company and started working for myself was find a good accountant to do my taxes. He got sick a couple of years later and sold his company to a larger company and I stayed with the new company. In 18 years, I have had to pay additional taxes maybe three times.
It's worth what I pay to have my taxes done (and the cost of the accountant is a deduction).
3. I've always thought it ironic that the federal politicians who are all rich and have accountants to make sure they take every loophole available are also the ones who vote to continually raise taxes while doing nothing to close the loopholes. These same politicians are also beholden to the "billionaires" for the cash donations to their re-election campaign funds (thereby selling their votes to the rich).
4. I'm in favor of the flat tax without loopholes. The best idea I can remember hearing was a flat 10% tax on anyone making over $50,000 a year with a flat 15% tax on anyone making over $250,000 a year.
An advanced degree in chemistry should make you smart enough to hire an accountant to prepare your taxes. And here's what's worse. After nine hours, you still may not have it right. And you may have overlooked some deductions that would have paid for the accountant.
I took several income tax courses in law school over forty years ago that convinced me to always hire an accountant to prepare my returns.
When I learned tax law the top marginal rate was 70%. Few people actually paid 70%, mostly ball players and lottery winners. Tax shelters then were more common, I think.
Every spring my clients today anticipate thousands of dollars in “refunds”, that exceed their withholding.
Politically it would be nearly impossible to change our tax code to what it was in 1980.
A balanced budget with an annual surplus is the goal.
We had that once, in the late 1990s, with a top marginal rate of about 40%
It took one small recession of 2000 and a long war in Iraq, to revert to deficits, and now nobody would sit still for paying the taxes and cutting spending.
When I learned tax law the top marginal rate was 70%. Few people actually paid 70%, mostly ball players and lottery winners. Tax shelters then were more common, I think.
Every spring my clients today anticipate thousands of dollars in “refunds”, that exceed their withholding.
Politically it would be nearly impossible to change our tax code to what it was in 1980.
A balanced budget with an annual surplus is the goal.
We had that once, in the late 1990s, with a top marginal rate of about 40%
It took one small recession of 2000 and a long war in Iraq, to revert to deficits, and now nobody would sit still for paying the taxes and cutting spending.
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Some historical trivia for you...
In the late 1780s, the fledgling United States had a problem. It had very little money so it started levying tariffs on imports to fund the government. Obviously, tariffs and taxes didn't go over too well and people started smuggling goods into the new states. Alexander Hamilton proposed the creation of "a system of 10 cutters" to combat smuggling and on August 4, 1790, Congress created the Revenue Marine Service (later named the Revenue Cutter Service until it was renamed the U.S. Coast Guard in 1915).
The Revenue Marines were so successful at stopping the smuggling, that for several years, the United States was basically operating in the black with the exception of paying off the debts incurred during the war.
The downside to this was eventually the Congress decided it need more money so decided to start taxing whiskey. This lead to the Whiskey Rebellion that lasted from 1791 until 1794.
And the leader of the federal troops sent to collect the whiskey revenue from the tax protestors was George Washington himself, riding a white charger. Can you imagine any other President than Andrew Jackson or Teddy Roosevelt doing that?.
Whiskey Rebellion - Wikipedia
If you’d like an effective government you must have the courage to collect tax revenue. That’s been true for thousands of years in all nations.
The wealthy people would prefer the poor pay the taxes and the poor would rather soak the rich.
And everybody is for cutting all government expenditures except the ones they like, such as the military or social programs, and never the ones that pay them, of course.
We all agree we need a government of some kind, to print money, define weights and measures, enforce laws, defend the country, etc.
The necessity of paying for it, divides us.
We were told they were going after the billionaires, on a side not they have a new tip reporting system for tipped employees and don't concern yourself with that little thing about transactions over $600, nothing to do with those IRS agents.
Those 87K New workers are probably going to be used to pick up the slack of the union slackers the IRS currently has to put up with and who can't be terminated because of the union.
Full disclosure. My wife was a bankruptcy clerk for the IRS. SHE DID NOT GET INVOLVED N THE COLLECTION OF TAXES. She dealt with all the tax paperwork involved when an individual or company filed for bankruptcy. That being said, it was common for her to come home and complain about some of her co-workers.
For example, one woman would arrive at work, sign in, and go downstairs for coffee. The worker would come back 30 minutes later and get on the phone with a friend for almost an hour. Then she would take another 30 minute coffee break, work for a few minutes and then announce she was going to the bathroom. Come back for another 15 or 20 minutes and leave for lunch. She often took about two hours for lunch, come back and freaking take a nap at her desk, wake up, take a break, move some papers around and then sign out for the day.
Her manager tried to write her up for a disciplinary action and she called her union rep and civil rights advocate and they got it reduced to a warning. This repeated itself about every three months for a year until the manager finally got her "promoted" to a different office.
Point is, all the government offices could run more efficiently and reduce costs if they could make the employees work. I'm not anti-union because I've seen the union step in and help people. I'm just against a union protecting people who don't want to do anything but collect their checks.
Never gonna happen. With billionaires paying anywhere from 0% to 2% of their income, on average, their servants, the people we voted for, are going to nix it. Gets in the way of their directorships after they leave office.
The other issue is that much of the wealth isn't money, it's assets, like stocks, bonds, a business, and real estate. How popular would an asset tax be?
I prepare and file my taxes in the third week of January both for the business but my personal as well. Everything is in the hands of my accountant on January 1st along with all excel sheets, ledgers and receipts. Every receipt is 'Bates' numbered and indexed to my master ledger. I enjoy putting tooth paste back into tubes!
I understand why the title was edited but why was this part added to the original post? Or was it part of his original post? It doesn’t look like it fits and it is very confusing to read.