Leaderboard

I think if you can document that a hairstylist is present, you can pay for the lunch and get CE credit for the meeting.

Client: I was having lunch with my girlfriends and talking about the taxes we all had to pay this year. Barb asked me if Jeff did side jobs cause they always owe till they consider the side jobs. Me: The only way side jobs reduce your taxes is if you lose money on them. They are happy about losing money? Yeah, yeah, I know what’s going on. They are reporting expenses and not income. I went over that with her, too. Sigh. I wish they wouldn't talk about taxes at lunch.

Were any of the friends also hairdressers? That would lend more weight to their advice. /s

would let me select "mailing in" and then fill in the address to mail it to. If i deselect anything, it still says efiling, and then I try to eliminate the EF forms, and get errors. we always have to resort to hand typing letters when the forms have to be mailed.

If this chair is one that costs a couple of hundred and looks like any other upright office or desk chair that has some small component that vibrates, then I'd probably deduct it if the taxpayer is using it at a desk or table that he uses for performing administrative functions of the business, whether or not he has a home office deduction, and its cost would probably fall in the de minimus range. Conversely, if this chair is one of those big cushy recliner types that cost thousands that doesn't at all lend itself to sitting at a desk or some other place where administrative functions of the business could be performed, then it is a personal expenditure. I'd have a problem in claiming that one of those cushy recliner-type massage chairs was in any way "ordinary" in the context of "ordinary and necessary" for a painting business. A good page on "ordinary and necessary".

My IntelliConnect is entirely online.

Did she buy your lunch? Rich

A horrible example of what can happen to someone when the IRS decides to abuse their power. KC At the historic federal courthouse in Marquette, Michigan, on Washington Street near Lake Superior (known as the UP, or Upper Peninsula) and after a five-year criminal investigation and a four-count felony indictment, Jon Matteson — who lives in Moran, Michigan, and was in the marine-service business with two full-service marines on Gun Lake — was found not guilty on all four charges of income-tax evasion. The jury trial began on Monday, May 18; and the jury returned with a verdict of not guilty on Friday, May 22. Matteson, if convicted, faced up to 20 years in a federal prison and fines of up to $1 million. The case was prosecuted out of the Grand Rapids, Michigan, U.S. Attorney’s Office by Assistant U.S. Attorney B. Rene Shekmer and IRS special agent Rick Pike. Matteson was defended by one of the nation’s top criminal defense lawyers, lead counsel Michael Minns, and his partner Ashley Arnett, both of the law firm Minns and Arnett (formerly The Minns Firm), and local counsel Karl Numinen. The government had previously indicted the trustee of Matteson’s trust, Herb Friske, who pleaded guilty and received time in prison. Friske, during the trial of Matteson, testified that he pleaded guilty after Pike conducted a raid on his home, breaking down the door in the wee hours of the morning, handcuffing his ill wife, cuffing his son and restraining him on the floor with four officers holding M16s to his head. Friske testified Pike threatened him with nine years in prison and that both his wife and his son would be indicted if he did not agree to plead guilty to a felony. Both Friske and Matteson had purchased trusts from alleged expert David Simmons, who operated out of Sarasota, Florida. Simmons had secretly cooperated with the IRS to accuse and convict his two former clients of tax evasion by voluntarily testifying before a grand jury against each client: Friske in 2010 and Matteson in December 2014. Both Friske and Matteson claimed that they had paid Simmons a great deal of money to give them tax and trust-planning advice. Simmons, however, had twice secretly testified before grand juries that he did not do that. During the trial itself, Simmons testified that he never gave legal advice or accounting advice or any other advice regarding trusts. Matteson’s former tax preparer, Bill Ayers, testified that he quit doing Matteson’s tax returns when Pike approached him and “suggested” that Ayers quit doing Matteson’s work. Ayers testified that he was then fearful of losing his license if he did not do as Pike asked. During a blistering cross-examination by Minns, Simmons admitted that he had worked for A.L. Williams and was called a “termite.” Williams’ “termites” would “sell” generally elderly customers on the idea that they should convert the valuable equity in their whole life insurance policies into cash and “invest” the cash with them. Most of Williams’ “termite” customers lost all or most of their equity in their insurance. Simmons angrily responded that he failed to see what his past had to do with Matteson’s trial. Minns calmly smiled and told him, “That’s for the jury to decide.” And in short order, it would. Simmons also admitted that he had a $1 million tax lien against him, that he had been ordered by the Florida State Bar not to practice law, that he had signed a consent agreement, that he had been found guilty of using a false Social Security number and that had been found guilty by a tax court judge of selling useless trusts of the same nature as the one he had sold both Friske and Matteson. Pike never took the witness stand to explain his actions. In his closing argument Minns asked the jury why the IRS would separate a legitimate tax preparer from his client, Matteson, while simultaneously doing nothing to separate him or anyone else from con man termite Simmons. IRS revenue officer Jaime Howard testified that Matteson owed back taxes for incorrectly prepared returns in 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 in substantial amounts. However, on cross examination by Minns she admitted she may have gotten her figures wrong and it was possible that Matteson owed no taxes and, in fact, was due a refund. Earlier, on cross-examination, another IRS agent, Victoria O’Brien, was interrogated by Arnett, who introduced a refund check for 2013 in the amount of $529 through the IRS agent. The agent agreed it was a bona fide refund check from the IRS, and she admitted under Arnett’s continued and forceful questioning that it meant the IRS believed no taxes were due as of 2013 on any returns previously filed. The government gave no clear explanation for this inconsistency. In his final argument to the jurors, Minns reminded them that one IRS expert said she wasn’t sure a tax was owed and another said the refund for 2013, received in 2014, meant no tax was owed for the previous years. The jury deliberated for two hours on Thursday afternoon and continued until 11 on Friday morning before reaching its unanimous not guilty verdict on all counts. Shekmer appeared to be shocked by the verdict and asked that the jury be polled. Twelve jurors then rose and one by one said that “not guilty” was his or her verdict. The case was tried in a small, old courthouse near Lake Superior to a full courtroom of supporters of the Matteson family, onlookers who simply came to watch Minns’ trial expertise (some of whom traveled hundreds of miles) and numerous IRS officials who also tend to flock to these trials when Minns is leading the defense. The US~Observer has found only nine acquittals on criminal tax evasion counts this entire year by American juries. All nine belong to Minns and Arnett. If you are aware of a bona fide not guilty jury verdict this year, particularly if it involved misconduct by government officials, please notify the US~Observer at 541-474-7885 or send an email to [email protected]. If you or anyone you know has done business with Simmons, or purchased trust products, or received legal or accounting advice from him, please notify us as well. –Edward Snook

And sometimes Social Security gets it wrong. It may be rare, but it happened to one of my clients a couple of years ago. He had to go to Social Security office with son and son's birth certificate. Turns out they made the son 2 years older than he really was. It was corrected before the October extension deadline. Note - returns had been accepted for several years. Previously IRS had not (always?) verified dependents' birthday.

Verify his DOB from his birth certificate. IRS very seldom gets this one wrong. Even some parents don't know the exact birthdate of their children.

Well, at least you can tell him he should be relieved to know we massaged the idea from every vantage point.

I don't see why not. One can have a home office that is used overwhelmingly for business BUT does not meet the "solely and exclusively" test for home office deduction. Facts and circumstances: would the taxpayer have purchased the furniture and equipment if they did not do office work at home? If not - then it is business use.

Leave it like it is. I hate "monolithic slab" entries in a forum. I personally learned to indent paragraphs, two spaces after a period and double space between paragraphs if not indented. This way, those that chose not to learn how to properly write and compose letters or information can post and we can read it.

Had some income in 2014 but looks like 2015 will be better as tp is now listed as a loomer(what ever that is) and was featured in a a big state artisan event. I am leaning towards all these cones of yarn and etc being inventory and letting TP tell me how much is left. TP does have a separate bank account and a business license for this.

I think tying it to some dubious medical purpose is over-thinking it, and probably would fail the laugh test in an audit. But I don't think it's necessary to go there in the first place. This is a chair, period. The fact that it has a massage feature is irrelevant, unless maybe that adds thousand of dollars to the cost. How much does the massage chair cost, anyhow? Most of us use chairs that have piston tubes that allow us to adjust height of the chair and/or spring mechanisms that allow us to adjust the resistance when we lean back. Those features aren't really "necessary", since we could just use a wooden chair with no adjustments, or maybe just a hard plastic chair that only costs $20 at K-Mart. So where exactly is the line drawn with respect to what's deductible? Besides, I'll bet the chair that the auditor sits in at his/her office to write up the audit report cost many times what the massage chair would cost, and based upon how the government throws money around, it might NOT even be any more useful than the $20 plastic version.

The Enter key creates a new Paragraph. On the web, Paragraphs almost always are double spaced (have a bottom margin, that is, white space between paragraphs) to improve readability. The reason that style is so common is because indentation of the first line (like in newspapers) is almost never used and not having either styling leads to a difficult-to-read monolithic slab of text with no visual separation between paragraphs. It's pretty much standard practice for Enter to create a Paragraph. There isn't a feature to change it per-user, I'm afraid. The only thing I could do is change Paragraph styling site-wide to remove that bottom margin for all paragraphs, which I'm reluctant to do for two reasons: I'm not sure that everyone wants it that way, like I said Enter = Paragraph is pretty standardMore importantly, every paragraph in every thread would lose its bottom margin, and as a result we'd have no spacing between paragraphs, just that monolithic slab of text in every post.Anyway, in instances where you don't want a new paragraph, what you're looking for is a "line break". Most word processors, including Word and this site's editor have a shortcut to create a line break. Here (and in many programs) it's Shift+Enter. Sometimes it's Ctrl+Enter. If your problem is that you have changed the default behavior in Word and other applications, and when you get here you're creating double paragraphs by mistake... All I can say is sorry for the frustration

​I don't think I see anywhere in the code or regs that the testing for affordability is wealth based. It all seems to be income based in my reading. So, I could have a million bucks in the bank, and still qualify for the subsidies because my job working seasonally at the ski resorts does not meet the 400% poverty level. That is the way I read it. Just my 2 cents. Tom Newark, CA

With that much money, I do not see hardship at all.