Accountant Charged With ‘Theft By Swindle’ Big-league baseball players like the ones who just wrapped up the World Series enjoy careers that last 5.9 years on average, and with 162 games per year, they enjoy lots of chances to be heroes. But eventually, even the best of them hang up their cleats and join the rest of us in the real world. The lucky ones find high-profile gigs running car dealerships or calling games from the broadcast booth. But every once in a while, a former player manages to makes headlines where you’d least expect them — like working as
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A Scary Disconnect
The “Double-Entry Bookkeeping” System, Legend holds that in 1494, an Italian friar named Luca Pacioli was sitting under an apple tree when an apple bounced off his head. In a flash of insight, he invented the “double-entry bookkeeping” system where each entry has a corresponding and opposite entry to a different account. Those entries, called debits and credits, help accountants avoid headaches — if the debits and credits don’t balance, there’s a mistake somewhere. (Some of you may be thinking that was Sir Isaac Newton with the apple inventing gravity, but this is our story and we’re sticking to it.) Double-entry bookkeeping
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The Taxpayer Who Never Was
Pseudocide & Taxes Life is full of ups and downs, and sometimes the downs can be so low that it doesn’t feel like there’s ever going to be an up again. How many people have dreamed of faking their own death and disappearing under a new identity, never to return to their problems again? It’s called “pseudocide,” and it’s popular enough that novelists have a field day writing thrillers about it. John Grisham pulls some variation of that stunt in half a dozen books, and J.K Rowling, Tom Clancy, and Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) have all joined him in that
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Don’t Let These Guys Catch You Paying Taxes!
IRS Investigates Business Owners for Paying Their Taxes Streaming TV services like Netflix have changed how we watch television, dropping an entire season of a series at once for us to binge on. They’ve even breathed new life into “quality television,” a phrase that used to provoke laughs from that insufferably smug type of person who used to brag that they didn’t even own what we all used to call the “idiot box.” Netflix has mined TV gold from all sorts of settings. Orange is the New Black explores life inside a women’s prison. Stranger Things is a love letter to classic 1980s sci-fi/horror films. And Bojack
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Something to Fight About!
Whiskey Played a Role in Tax Protest Fall is officially here, and that means whiskey season is back. Most drinkers probably don’t think much about taxes when they visit their favorite bar or spirits shop. Liquor levies are generally based on volume, not price, so you pay the same amount of tax on a $4 fifth of Olde Ocelot as the swells pay for their $269 Pappy Van Winkle. But did you know that whiskey played a central role in our country’s first tax protest, which took place around this same season 224 years ago? Turn the dial on the
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All Fun and Games
Transfer Pricing: The Game Some of the world’s most popular board games give players the chance to live out professional fantasies. Aspiring property sharks can cheat each other with the classic Monopoly. Would-be Sherlock Holmeses can track down killers with Clue. Armchair generals can settle down to an evening of Risk. But until today there’s never been a game to let aspiring tax planners outwit the Internal Revenue Code. Shouldn’t that be at least as much fun as figuring out it was Colonel Mustard in the Library with the candlestick? Well, that all changes in the form of a new board game called “Transfer
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R-E-S-P-E-C-T the Plan
Why It’s Important to Create a Will Aretha Franklin left this world with a musical legacy for the ages. The Queen of Soul started singing for her father’s “gospel carnival tours” at 12, cut her first record at 18, and scored her first hit a year later. She went on to record 112 hit singles, including 20 #1s, and won 18 Grammies. She performed for presidents and even sang for a real queen (of England). When word broke of her death last month, many questioned who on earth could possibly sing at her funeral? (Answer: Stevie Wonder, Jennifer Hudson, and many more.) Unfortunately, Franklin
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Floating Palace, Indeed!
DeVos Family Yacht Flies Foreign Flag and Avoids US Taxes This week’s story is a briny chowder of petty vandalism, tax avoidance, partisan posturing, and flat-out misinformation. There’s probably something in here to offend everyone. So buckle your seat belts and get ready for a ride! Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been one of Donald Trump’s most controversial cabinet officials since barely surviving Senate confirmation thanks to the Vice-President’s tie-breaker. It doesn’t help that she’s also one of Trump’s wealthiest appointees. She and her husband Dick, son of Amway founder Richard DeVos, are worth an estimated $1.3 billion. And the
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Awwww, He Has His Daddy’s . . . Tax Break?
California Homeowners Can Pass On Low Land Taxes To Kids Mother Nature knew exactly what she was doing when she made babies cute. In fact, evolutionary biologists at Oxford University recently concluded they evolved that way to survive by encouraging the rest of us to look after them. “This is the first evidence of its kind to show that cuteness helps infants to survive by eliciting care-giving, which cannot be reduced to simple, instinctual behaviours,” says professor Morten Kringelbach. (And couldn’t Oxford have found something less obvious to study?) Half the fun of meeting a new baby is looking to see what
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Can You Imagine the Smell?
Regulations Eliminate Charitable Deductions for Gifts The Infinite Monkey Theorem holds that if you sit an infinite number of monkeys down at an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them will bang out the complete works of William Shakespeare — or, at the very least, Hamlet. But do you know what those monkeys are banging out when they’re not banging out Shakespeare? The Internal Revenue Code, of course! (Sadly, the Infinite Monkey Theorem will probably never be more than just a theorem. For starters, can you imagine the smell in that room?) The tax code may look like 70,000-odd pages of monkey-banging gibberish. But
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