Good Guys Share $175 Million Refund

April 15 hasn't always been the national exercise in self-flagellation that it is today. Up until the 1940s, you could just waltz into your local IRS office and they would do your taxes for you. But those days have long since passed. You're still welcome to do it yourself, if you need more stress in your life. But how will you know if you're paying too much? Even software like TurboTax can't guarantee you'll get it right. If you don't know how to use it, the program just helps you make the same expensive mistakes faster than when you made them with paper and pencils.

If you're like most Americans, you just throw up your hands and call a pro. That begs a new question: who to call? Certified Public Accountants and Enrolled Agents have traditionally dominated the field. But up until 2010, anyone with a pencil could call himself a tax preparer. (Most of them use computers now — but, surprisingly, not all. Hey, some people still carry flip phones, too.) That seems like an obvious vacuum in today's regulatory environment, considering that in most places, you need a license just to catch a fish. And we all know bureaucracy abhors a vacuum.

In 2009, the IRS decided to do something. After a series of public forums and comments, they launched the Registered Tax Return Preparer (RTRP) program. The new rules required preparers to: 1) sign up for a Preparer Tax Identification Number, 2) pass a 2.5 hour test, and 3) complete 15 hours of continuing education per year. Naturally, the IRS charged a fee for the program, which started at $64.25 per year. And they based their authority to do it all on an obscure 1884 law regulating representatives of civil war soldiers looking for compensation for dead horses.

Everyone was happy with the RTRP, except the people subject to the new rules (and maybe those long-dead horses). Preparers felt like they were being forced to take a test to prove they could do something they had done, in some cases, for decades. So three of them sued to shut down the program. And they won — the court agreed that the 1884 law didn't give the IRS authority to regulate an industry that didn't even exist when it was passed. (Oops.)

The IRS suspended the RTRP program. But they kept charging the PTIN fees, even though the program the fees were supposed to finance had ended. So, one year later, a different group of preparers filed another suit to recover those fees.

Once again, the court ruled in their favor. This June, the court decided that PTINs aren't a "service or thing of value" justifying a fee. The IRS can't charge fees for PTINs, "because this would be equivalent to imposing a regulatory licensing scheme and the IRS does not have such regulatory authority." (Don't hold your breath waiting for Congress to give it to them.) And yes, the IRS has to give back all the PTIN fees they've collected. That was $175 million when the plaintiffs filed their complaint; but it could be as high as $300 million now.

Chalk one up for the good guys, right? Well, sure. But here's the real lesson: most tax preparers, credentialed or not, focus on putting the "right" numbers in the "right" boxes on the "right" forms. They do a great job of telling you how much you owe — but nothing about how to pay less. And that has everything to do with attitude, not credentials. So call us when you're ready to save — and remember, we're here for your family, friends, and colleagues, too!

Ivy League Tax Problems

They say that "what goes up must come down." But that's not true when it comes to college costs. U.S. News reports the average private college tuition stood at $16,233 back in 1997-98 — roughly $24,973 in 2017 dollars. But the same tuition today costs $41,727. And that's before pricing in luxuries like, you know, meals, and a place to sleep. In-state college costs are rising even faster as legislatures cut budgets for higher education. That means colleges are increasingly turning to alternate funding sources, including their endowments.

In academia, though, as in so many other parts of our "winner take all" society, there's the 1%, and there's everyone else. America's richest 800 colleges and universities hold over $500 billion in endowments, which sounds like there should be plenty to help supplement tuition and fees. But the top 1% of schools hold over $10 billion each, and 11% of schools hog 74% of those assets. That leaves the Faber Colleges of the world essentially fighting over scraps. ("Knowledge is good.")

Now, the Phi Beta Kappas who write our tax code have turned their green eyeshades towards those mammoth pools of tax-free wealth. Both the House and Senate tax bills working through Congress would impose a 1.4% excise tax on net investment income of private colleges holding more than $250,000 per student. That group includes about 70 schools, including obvious targets like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. At the same time, the proposal spares public school systems with big endowments like the Universities of Texas ($25.4 billion), Michigan ($9.7 billion), and California ($7.4 billion).

It's true that if any schools have "too much money" (LOL), it's the top-shelf Ivies. Harvard's endowment started in 1638 with £779 and 400 books. Over the next 379 years, it's grown to over $37 billion (and 16 million books), leading critics to call it a hedge fund with a university attached. In 2015 that fund grew by just 5.8%, compared to rival Yale's 11.5%. But Harvard Management Company paid its chief executive a whopping $14.9 million, with his deputy taking home $11.6 million. (And you thought college football coaches were overpaid!)

Academic endowments have grown so large that they're starting to use some of the same tax strategies as the richest individuals. The New York Times recently exposed how colleges use offshore entities to boost earnings, including "blocker corporations" that let them avoid tax on debt-financed "unrelated business taxable income." (Trust us, those UBTI rules are even more boring and technical than they sound.)

But naturally, academics are irate at the proposal, rolling up their leather-patched tweed sleeves and prepping for a (genteel) fight. "Endowments support substantial student aid and student service programs, and provide funding for instruction, research, and for building and maintaining classrooms, labs, libraries, and other facilities," said the Association of American Universities. At Princeton (the #1 target with $2.5 million per student), undergraduates from families earning under $56,000 pay no tuition, room, or board, while those from families earning under $160,000 pay no tuition.

Here's the good news. You don't have to be an Ivy League university — or even have an Ivy League education — to save big on your tax bill. You just need a proactive plan. So call us when you're ready for some real-world lessons on how to pay less!

The Rock Star, The Nude Estates, and the Lithuanian Shopping Mall

We've all got an image in our minds of who uses "offshore tax havens" to host their business. Let's say you're a junior-varsity Russian oligarch. You've spent a lifetime looting your country's resources like an all-you-can-steal buffet, and now it's time to take some of your chipskis off the table. You buy a flat in London's posh Mayfair, or maybe a condo overlooking New York's Central Park. Then you stash the rest of your rubles in some sunny flyspeck of an island like Bermuda or the Caymans, where Putin's goons can't steal them back.

But most people who do business offshore aren't crooked billionaires. They're perfectly legitimate multinational corporations, business owners, and investors just like us. If you've worn shoes from Nike, made calls on an iPhone, or downloaded music from Sheryl Crow, you've even done business with them!

Last month, the investigative journalists who brought us 2016's Panama Papers dropped Season Two of their effort to expose how the global 1% use international entities to structure their wealth. The "Paradise Papers" include 13.4 million electronic documents, mostly gleaned through a "data security incident" from the Bermuda-based law firm of Appleby Spurling Hunter. And one of the names that those intrepid detectives uncovered was Paul David Hewson, originally from Dublin's middle-class Finglas suburb.

Of course, you probably know Hewson better by his stage name, Bono. (His U2 bandmates dubbed him Bono Vox, meaning "good voice," in high school.) Now, Bono's made hundreds of millions of dollars in his career. But he's also hobnobbed with the Dalai Lama and been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. He's hardly the sort of guy you'd expect to be moving money in mysterious ways. So what's the deal? Here's how the BBC lays it out:


"Bono owned a share in the Ausra shopping center located in the Lithuanian city of Utena via his stake in a company called Nude Estates, based in Malta. In 2007, Nude Estates bought the mall via a company they incorporated in Lithuania called UAB Nude Estates 2. In 2012, Nude Estates Malta Ltd. transferred the ownership of both Nude Estates 2 and the mall to a new offshore company, Nude Estates 1, based on the English island of Guernsey. Both Malta and Guernsey are low-tax jurisdictions, though foreign investors pay a five percent tax on company profits in Malta, while they pay no tax in Guernsey."

There you have it. Even paying 5% tax in Malta, they still hadn't found what they were looking for. So Nude Estates tripped through the waters with Bono's money for the rattle and hum of tax-free Guernsey. Bono himself seemed taken aback by the disclosure. He said he would be distressed if "anything less than exemplary" was done with his name anywhere near it. And he said, "I take this stuff very seriously. I have campaigned for the beneficial ownership of offshore companies to be made transparent. Indeed this is why my name is on documents rather than in a trust."

Here in the U.S, we're subject to tax on all our worldwide income, no matter where it's earned. That means that moving investments offshore doesn't convey any sort of automatic tax benefit, with or without you. Fortunately, the same internal revenue code that taxes us on foreign income offers countless strategies to minimize or avoid that tax. All you really need is a plan. So call us when you desire to save, and let's see if we can rescue enough wasted tax dollars to send you someplace where the streets have no name!

Stranger Taxes

The streaming video service Netflix has earned a reputation for providing quality content like Narcos, Orange is the New Black, and The Queen. But Netflix has also upended how millions of people consume television. How have they done that? By dropping an entire season's worth of a series all at once, letting you "Netflix and chill" with a single episode or binge for an entire weekend. (What kind of savage network would make viewers wait an entire week between episodes of their favorite show? HBO, that's who.)
Netflix's latest hit, which dropped its second season last month, is Stranger Things, a love letter to the classic horror, sci-fi, and fantasy films of the 1980s. The show features a pack of bike-riding preteen friends from sleepy Hawkins, Indiana, who team up with the local sheriff and a mysterious paranormal girl named Eleven. Together, the motley crew fights to save the world from a parallel universe that connects through the super-secret "Hawkins National Laboratory."
Most Stranger Things viewers love the show's music and movie references. Naturally, it makes us nostalgic for 1980s taxes. (Have we told you we need to get out more often?) So, for all you "Upside Down" fans, let's take a walk down memory lane and see what taxes looked like when it was "morning in America":

• The '80s opened with 15 tax brackets topping out at 70% for joint filers reporting $215,400+ in taxable income (roughly $683,000 in today's dollars). In 1981, Washington dropped the top rate down to 50%, and the Tax Reform Act of 1986 condensed the whole shebang into just two brackets topping out at 28%.

Tax shelters were big business! If you didn't feel like giving Uncle Sam 70% of your last dollar of income, you could buy limited partnership interests in all sorts of activities, including oil and gas programs, real estate syndications, cattle feeding schemes, aircraft and equipment leasing deals, and "master recording disks," whatever those were. Nobody "invested" in these boondoggles because they made business sense; they were all about the tax losses.

You could report your dependent children on the honor system, without supplying Social Security numbers. This led to millions of people fraudulently claiming deductions for nonexistent children and even household pets. (Don't just love them like family . . . deduct them like family!)

You could disappear from the office like Don Draper for a three-martini lunch and write off 100% of the cost, versus 50% today. (As former President Gerald Ford put it in a 1978 speech, "Where else can you get an earful, a bellyful, and a snootful at the same time?")

You could deduct interest you paid to buy almost anything except tax-free bonds. Want one of those little Japanese cars that were just hitting the market? How about your first "personal computer"? What about a microwave oven or VCR? You could deduct interest you paid to buy all of them. Here's something to think about as you sit down for season two of Stranger Things. The shadow monster, demogorgons, and The Upside Down are all just make-believe — but the risk of overpaying your taxes is very real. So don't fight your way out of a creepy government lab — or scary IRS tax code — all by yourself! Call us for a plan and we'll guide you to safety!