Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
--Ernest Hemmingway
Lesson From The Tax Court: Administrative File Notes Are Not Ex-Parte Contact
Tax
collectors have an tough and lonely job. I know. I collected taxes
for Arlington County, Virginia shortly after law school. And when I was
in IRS Office of Chief Counsel, my clients were Revenue Officers (ROs),
the IRS employees whose dolorous job is to collect unpaid taxes.
When
a taxpayer receives a CDP hearing, ROs are prohibited from making ex
part contacts with anyone in Appeals about the substance of the
collections under review. If the RO wants to communicate with anyone in
Appeals about matters that are not ministerial, administrative, or
procedural, they must give taxpayers an opportunity to participate in
the discussion. Rev. Proc. 2000-43,
§3, Q&A-6. If they violate the ex-parte prohibition, then the CDP
hearing becomes tainted and the ex part nature of the contact must
either be cured or else the case be reassigned. Rev. Proc. 2012-18, §2.10(1).
Not every communication from an RO to Appeals is a prohibited ex parte contact. Last week’s case of Jason Stewart and Kristy Stewart v. Commissioner,
T.C. Memo 2019-116 (September 10, 2019) (Judge Kerrigan) teaches a
lesson in what does not constitute a prohibited communication from an RO
to the Settlement Officer in a CDP hearing. Details below the fold...
via Bryan Camp
"Don't feel bad for him. There actually are some who do love
him; they just keep their heads down. . . "
...
What does the
rise of the child activist say about us?
Suchandrika Chakrabarti,
via Medium
The media obsession
with — and recent mockery of — teen climate activist Greta Thunberg show how
we’re failing future generations.
--Ernest Hemmingway
Lesson From The Tax Court: Administrative File Notes Are Not Ex-Parte Contact
When
a taxpayer receives a CDP hearing, ROs are prohibited from making ex
part contacts with anyone in Appeals about the substance of the
collections under review. If the RO wants to communicate with anyone in
Appeals about matters that are not ministerial, administrative, or
procedural, they must give taxpayers an opportunity to participate in
the discussion. Rev. Proc. 2000-43,
§3, Q&A-6. If they violate the ex-parte prohibition, then the CDP
hearing becomes tainted and the ex part nature of the contact must
either be cured or else the case be reassigned. Rev. Proc. 2012-18, §2.10(1).
Not every communication from an RO to Appeals is a prohibited ex parte contact. Last week’s case of Jason Stewart and Kristy Stewart v. Commissioner,
T.C. Memo 2019-116 (September 10, 2019) (Judge Kerrigan) teaches a
lesson in what does not constitute a prohibited communication from an RO
to the Settlement Officer in a CDP hearing. Details below the fold...
via Bryan Camp
"Don't feel bad for him. There actually are some who do love
him; they just keep their heads down. . . "
...
What does the rise of the child activist say about us?
Ben Kelly on Risk and Opportunities
The key ingredient for success that no-one wants to talk about
Vinyl set to outsell CDs for first time since 1986
Atlas Obscura – 257 small steps for our human cousins, one giant leap for paleoanthropology. “Of the variety of ancient hominins who have roamed this planet, Neanderthals are among the most recently departed. Long stigmatized as lumbering, backwards versions of us—think “caveman” and all that implies—scholarship is increasingly overwriting this view. Neanderthals, it turns out, were culturally and socially complex beings (who interbred with humans for thousands of years).
Die hard
PS News
Special mention of the Australian Taxation Office
now for a glimmer of capitational comedy in its sober announcement that a
cafe operator moonlighting as a used car salesperson in Queensland had
fallen foul of the force of law, claiming generous GST refunds that were
not legally claimable in his case.
Soulfully declaring the tax-dodger’s demise, the ATO didn’t hold back
its glee, creatively headlining its announcement: ‘Fake car salesman’s
GST scheme runs out of gas’.Perhaps less creatively, it probably meant ran out of petrol!
The Hidden Box Of Dr. Seuss
Theodore Seuss Geisel died in 1991, but his widow was cleaning out a closet in 2013 when she came across a box of his unpublished, and some unfinished, manuscripts. Or, as the Timesheadlines it, “Yes, They Found It in a Box.” – The New York Times
MIT Taskforce on the Future of Work Fall 2019 – “…The world now stands on the cusp of a technological revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics that may prove as transformative for economic growth and human potential as were electrification, mass production, and electronic telecommunications in their eras. New and emerging technologies will raise aggregate economic output and boost the wealth of nations. Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined.
They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era. How can we move beyond unhelpful prognostications about the supposed end of work and toward insights that will enable policymakers, businesses, and people to better nav-igate the disruptions that are coming and underway? What lessons should we take from previous epochs of rapid technological change? How is it different this time? And how can we strengthen institutions, make investments, and forge policies to ensure that the labor market of the 21st century enables workers to contribute and succeed?
To help answer these questions, and to provide a framework for the Task Force’s efforts over the next year, this report examines several aspects of the interaction between work and technology. We begin in Section 1 by stating an underlying premise of our project: work is intrinsically valuable to individuals and to society as a whole, and we should seek to improve rather than eliminate it. The second section introduces the broader concerns that motivated the Task Force’s formation. Here we address a paradox: despite a decade of low unemployment and generally rising prosperity in the United States and industrialized countries, public discourse around the subject of technology and work is deeply pessimis-tic. We argue that this pessimism is neither misguided nor uninformed, but rather a reflec-tion of a decades-long disconnect between rising productivity and stagnant incomes for the majority of workers…”
Google Blog: “Google Search was built to provide everyone access to information on the web—and with tens of thousands of web pages, hundreds of hours of video, thousands of tweets and news stories published every minute of the day, our job is to sift through that content and find the most helpful results possible. With news in particular, we always aim to show a diversity of articles and sources to give users as much context and insight as possible. An important element of the coverage we want to provide is original reporting, an endeavor which requires significant time, effort and resources by the publisher. Some stories can also be both critically important in the impact they can have on our world and difficult to put together, requiring reporters to engage in deep investigative pursuits to dig up facts and sources. These are among the reasons why we aim to support these industry efforts and help people get access to the most authoritative reporting.
Five Key Research Findings on Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich, by David Gamage (Indiana)
An Introduction to Tax Careers for J.D.s, by Heather Field (UC-Hastings)
The Superiority of the Digital Services Tax over Significant Digital Presence Proposals, by Wei Cui (University of British Columbia)
MIT Taskforce on the Future of Work Fall 2019 – “…The world now stands on the cusp of a technological revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics that may prove as transformative for economic growth and human potential as were electrification, mass production, and electronic telecommunications in their eras. New and emerging technologies will raise aggregate economic output and boost the wealth of nations. Will these developments enable people to attain higher living standards, better working conditions, greater economic security, and improved health and longevity? The answers to these questions are not predetermined.
They depend upon the institutions, investments, and policies that we deploy to harness the opportunities and confront the challenges posed by this new era. How can we move beyond unhelpful prognostications about the supposed end of work and toward insights that will enable policymakers, businesses, and people to better nav-igate the disruptions that are coming and underway? What lessons should we take from previous epochs of rapid technological change? How is it different this time? And how can we strengthen institutions, make investments, and forge policies to ensure that the labor market of the 21st century enables workers to contribute and succeed?
To help answer these questions, and to provide a framework for the Task Force’s efforts over the next year, this report examines several aspects of the interaction between work and technology. We begin in Section 1 by stating an underlying premise of our project: work is intrinsically valuable to individuals and to society as a whole, and we should seek to improve rather than eliminate it. The second section introduces the broader concerns that motivated the Task Force’s formation. Here we address a paradox: despite a decade of low unemployment and generally rising prosperity in the United States and industrialized countries, public discourse around the subject of technology and work is deeply pessimis-tic. We argue that this pessimism is neither misguided nor uninformed, but rather a reflec-tion of a decades-long disconnect between rising productivity and stagnant incomes for the majority of workers…”
Google Blog: “Google Search was built to provide everyone access to information on the web—and with tens of thousands of web pages, hundreds of hours of video, thousands of tweets and news stories published every minute of the day, our job is to sift through that content and find the most helpful results possible. With news in particular, we always aim to show a diversity of articles and sources to give users as much context and insight as possible. An important element of the coverage we want to provide is original reporting, an endeavor which requires significant time, effort and resources by the publisher. Some stories can also be both critically important in the impact they can have on our world and difficult to put together, requiring reporters to engage in deep investigative pursuits to dig up facts and sources. These are among the reasons why we aim to support these industry efforts and help people get access to the most authoritative reporting.
Five Key Research Findings on Wealth Taxation for the Super Rich, by David Gamage (Indiana)
An Introduction to Tax Careers for J.D.s, by Heather Field (UC-Hastings)
The Superiority of the Digital Services Tax over Significant Digital Presence Proposals, by Wei Cui (University of British Columbia)
The Qualified Small Business Stock Exclusion: How Startup Shareholders Get $10 Million (Or More) Tax-Free, by Manoj Viswanathan (UC-Hastings)
Cannabis Businesses and Passthrough Deduction Availability, by Daniel Rowe (Green Hasson & Janks, Los Angeles)