This website is a labor of… not love, but its polar opposite, true hatred.
So long ago that this Age of Competence is probably a myth.
To be fair, this started before the Trump administration. But they’re also pursuing the “take away resources” approach, not just with the IRS but with many agencies. The State Dept’s lack of appointments is a fairly well-known example.
One of the things that pisses me off is those things where they tell people they can settle their IRS debts for pennies on the dollar.
Fuck that shit.
You owe taxes? You better pay that shit. I pay my taxes every damn year, everyone else should do the same. If you don’t, you should go to freaking jail.
Man, everyone around Trump seems to be a fucking criminal.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news. My father was a CPA specializing in tax for 40 years. It is pretty common for people who owe the IRS significant sums to work with them for some method of settlement. Perhaps not just the amount itself, but there are also payment plans set up, etc.
It’s called Offer in Compromise. The purpose is to actually keep a taxpayer as a taxpayer. Given enough financial hardship burdened by taxes and subsequent liens, said taxpayer may never again be able to pay or may go through bankruptcy and hardship for years to come. It is part of, but not explicitly given as part of the taxpayer bill of rights. You have the right to have the IRS consider your situation and hardship as part of your failure or inability to pay taxes. (Huge note here: that does NOT mean they will accept your submission for offer in compromise.)
Hear, hear! I totally agree.
Sure, but if you owe the taxes, you earned the money. Seems unlikely to me that you can’t make good on the debt absent shenanigans. I’m sure there are a few cases that might warrant a discount on the debt, but I’m guessing it gets used generally as a way to close cases fast; like plea bargaining in the criminal justice system. So fuck that.
So where would you both stand on bankruptcy? Hardship debt renegotiation? Hardship student loan assistance? Mortgage forbearance?
As with most of those, Offer in Compromise is NOT a given. The IRS essentially makes a decision as to how messed up your situation is, and then makes the call yea or nay. All those commercials you hear? They don’t have any guarantee, they help you through the same process you could do yourself or with a CPA.
Don’t confuse tax evasion (not reporting, misrepresenting, not filing due to large reward) with failure to pay what is owed due to hardship. I approve of jail time for the former, but only when all other options have been exhausted for the latter.
These are good questions, but: Most people pay their tax obligations as they go, through payroll withholding and withholding on the sale of assets. Self-employed people pay their taxes quarterly (or ought to). So the circumstances under which one owes a substantial tax payment but hasn’t the money to pay it seem, well, not ordinary or usual. What are those circumstances? Who are those people?
Whereas the circumstances under which people can’t pay their mortgages or their debts are far more pedestrian, starting with they lost their job. In that case, it makes sense that they can’t pay those obligations since they have no income. But that can’t be the reason they can’t pay their taxes, by and large, because those taxes are already paid.
I’m open to the idea that some people need relief, but (again) I’m guessing that it is used like plea bargaining to clear the case load.
That corroborates Cohen’s testimony that the payoffs were coordinated with the campaign, kind of shredding Trump’s “private transaction” defense.
I heard enough of both sides of it from my father (though I wasn’t supposed to), hell CPA’s that work in tax frequently end up representing clients as part of it. There are always bad apples. Business owners that are horrible at the financial side of things fell prey to getting into tax trouble, a lot. Self-employed people as well, but not nearly as much. And the results of some were strange.
I totally understand the rationale, i just thinking it’s bullshit that people get away without paying their taxes.
We all do, especially repeat offenders. He’s absolutely manipulating loopholes and probably evading as well, because he’s a lying sack of shit on everything else too.
I think all of those things are significantly different than giving people a pass on back taxes.
Bankruptcy is erasing debt that someone entered into voluntarily with you. And when you loan money, risk is always a factor. It translates into interest. When you lend money, usually it’s the case that the lendee doesn’t have enough to pay it back in the short term.
But taxes don’t work like that.
You pay your taxes every year. They are, by definition, only a portion of your income. In all but a very small set of circumstances, you have the money to pay taxes when they are due.
You get back taxes where you owe the IRS a ton of money, because you didn’t pay what you owed. And maybe that amount gets unmanageable over time, but it’s entirely because you didn’t pay what you owed… When you had the money to pay.
Not paying your taxes is theft from the rest of us who do. It’s no different than defrauding the government in any other way.
I can partially understand cases where you just screwed up, but I don’t get the impression that folks are owing mountains of taxes due to simple errors.
But hey, let’s all remember that the true criminals are the welfare queens stealing your hard earned money.
“Why don’t you pay your taxes?”
“Taxation without representation is tyranny!”
“What? You live in America.”
“Yeah, but I don’t vote, either!”
For the vast majority of people, you pay your taxes every week or two, before you even get paid. So it’s even harder to believe most tax cheats simply couldn’t come up with money.
Good point, you’re right. Most of the time, you don’t actually owe much money at all at the end of the year. Especially for normal average people who mainly just pay income taxes.
Shit, I owe negative taxes at the end of pretty much any year. Mainly because I don’t do the full alloyed deductions.
I think I have owed taxes at the end of the year literally once, and that was due to a bunch of financial stuff changing that year (paying off student loans, getting married, buying a car, etc).
That makes him smart!