This week we look at issues surrounding what are medical expenses for various tax purposes, as well as a case where the taxpayer successfully defended hiring her spouse as employee, and then covering him under a medical reimbursement plan.

The materials for this week's podcast are at this link.

This podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services.

We take a bit of a break from developments to talk about the issues and methods of tax research this week. We look at how to learn to efficiently deal with research issues that arise in a tax practice--especially during this busy season.

The materials are found at this link.

This podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, located on the web at http://www.leimbergservices.com.

This week's program discusses charitable remainder trusts in light of the IRS granting relief from an issue they first seemed to have discovered last year regarding the potential state law granted right of a surviving spouse to claim a share of a CRT upon the death of the creator of the trust.

The program discusses CRTs in general, including a discussion of which clients a CRT might or might not be appropriate for. We then look at the problem that a spouse's right to elect a share of the trust created, the IRS's initial response and then their recent reconsideration of that response.

The materials can be downloaded here.

This podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, found on the web at http://www.leimbergservices.com.

This week we take a look at the Tax Court's application of the charitable documentation regulations to two real world cases.

In the case of Kendrix v. Commissioner a former IRS CID employee and Revenue Officer is found to be lacking in the documentation for her many charitable contributions.

While there appears to be reason for the court to believe the contributions to be overstated or not made at all, the court actually keeps returning to technical inadequacies in her documentation to actually deny the deductions. The judge even muses that the court may have erred in the past in allowing the use of the Cohan rule to be used when documentation didn't meet the requirements, but ultimately concludes that the issue doesn't have to be dealt with in this case case. That makes this case potentially troubling since that same logic would apply even if there was no question the donation was made.

The second case is a Tax Court Summary opinion of Haas v. Commissioner where the court, among other things, gets to deal with the "I put cash in the plate they passed around at church."

The materials can be downloaded from this link.

This week's podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services.