Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Kardashians of Tax Returns


“If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.”  Nothing seems to cause anything, instead everything just modulates everything else."





“Honest people pay more taxes than they should have to because of those who don’t pay their share, it's a dangerous dynamic. It’s not fair that those doing the right thing end up having to pay for those who cheat the system.”Mr Michael Andrew Chair of the Black Economy Taskforce via CL


Private Investigator’s Attempt To Obtain Donald Trump’s Tax Return Led IRS To Shut Down FAFSA Data Retrieval Tool; Who Hired Him? “The person accused of a 2016 attempt to use a web-based federal student-aid tool to illegally obtain taxpayer information is a Louisiana-based private investigator who used the tool to target then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, court records obtained by Diverse show. The records allege that when Jordan Hamlett, 31, met FBI agents in the atrium of the Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge, he ‘immediately volunteered that he had committed the crime and he even sounded proud of what he had done.'”

We still don’t have a crime in this case, but there is an awful lot of coverup.


TaxProf, Private Investigator’s Attempt To Obtain Donald Trump’s Tax Return Led IRS To Shut Down FAFSA Data Retrieval Tool; Who Hired Him?. The TaxProf quotes from a story in the Diverse education blog:
 
The person accused of a 2016 attempt to use a web-based federal student-aid tool to illegally obtain taxpayer information is a Louisiana-based private investigator who used the tool to target then-presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, court records obtained by Diverse show.
The records allege that when Jordan Hamlett, 31, met FBI agents in the atrium of the Embassy Suites in Baton Rouge, he “immediately volunteered that he had committed the crime and he even sounded proud of what he had done.”
The Treasury Inspector General’s report on the hack said:

In September 2016, TIGTA detected an attempted access to the AGI of a prominent individual. When we investigated the attempted access, we determined that the FAFSA application and the DRT were used in this attempt. Since FAFSA is a Department of Education application, we notified the Education OIG and we notified the IRS Privacy, Governmental Liaison and Disclosure (PGLD) program office. We initiated a joint investigation with the Education OIG that included the Cyber Crimes Task Force. The investigation identified the individual responsible for the attempted access and he was arrested. This case is still proceeding through the court system. In November 2016, we noticed another attempted access of the same prominent individual’s AGI through the FAFSA and the DRT, this time, from an entirely different location. 
A prominent individual, indeed.
Prior coverage: FAFSA IRS data hack used already stolen info

 For four days at a sold-out, $1,250-per-ticket conference at a Boston hotel, content marketers offered a vision of the future of media. It's terrifying  MEdia Dragons 

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Jay A. Soled (Rutgers) & Kathleen DeLaney Thomas (North Carolina), Regulating Tax Return Preparation, 58 B.C. L. Rev. 151 (2017):

Every year the U.S. government collects nearly $3 trillion of income and employment taxes, a large share of which is used to deliver social welfare benefits to the poor. With respect to these collections and deliveries, the Form 1040 (U.S. Individual Income Tax Return) seeks to ensure taxpayer accuracy. In the twenty-first century, there are two sets of key players that dominate the Form 1040 preparation and submission process, namely, tax return preparers and tax return preparation software companies. The former hand-hold taxpayers through the entire tax return preparation and submission process while the latter provide taxpayers with the necessary tools to complete and submit tax returns on their own. These two groups – tax return preparers and tax software companies – thus stand as vital intermediaries between the government and taxpayers, assisting in the preparation of over 90 percent of all individual tax returns.



Payroll clients and staff fell for plausible business model fairy tales



 Leslie Book, Legal Practice and Mental Health (Procedurally Taxing). “As someone who has over the years benefitted from confronting mental health issues with the care of professionals, and who lost a dear friend to suicide, I believe that tax professionals and the organizations where they work should have at their disposal resources to help through inevitable tough times that are part of life.”


Tech Trends 2017
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