This week we look at a Court of Claims case that deals with an IRS examination and the imposition of the fraud penalty--a penalty the Court of Claims found was not justified.  The case is the one of Gagliardi v. United States, 2008 TNT 98-20, and is instructive both in the outline of the law, as well as allowing us to consider the ways an examination like this could spin out of control and result in a taxpayer being assessed the fraud penalty in a case like this.

The materials can be downloaded from http://www.edzollars.com/2008-06-02_FraudandtheDentist.pdf.

The podcast is being uploaded a bit early this week since I'll be traveling Saturday to New Orleans for the AICPA's Spring Tax Division meeting held there Monday and Tuesday. 

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

Simplified employee pensions (SEPs) are a popular retirement plan for extremely small businesses, with one of the key attractions being that don't require many of the formalities of regular qualified plans.  But that has led to taxpayers treating them too informally, and in the case we look at this week (Brown v. Commissioner, TC Summary 2008-56) a taxpayer discovered the hard way what can be the consequences of failing to faithfully follow the simplified rules for this type of plan.

The materials for this podcast can be found at http://www.edzollars.com/2008-05-26_SEP_Issue.pdf .

I'll be in New Orleans next Monday at the AICPA Spring Tax Division meeting, so the next podcast may come out on a slightly different schedule.

The podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, located at http://www.leimbergservices.com.

The Fifth Circuit came down with a ruling in Kornman & Associates, Inc. v. United States on whether a taxpayer who set up a Son of BOSS style shelter would get the benefit that was expected--and the taxpayer was disappointed.  The case offers a chance to review the unusual impact that liabilities have in a partnership context, as well as the question of just what is a liability for this purpose.

The materials for this podcast can be downloaded at http://www.edzollars.com/2008-05-19_Partnership_Liabilities.pdf .

The podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, located at http://www.leimbergservices.com .

Since we've discussed mailing returns in previous podcasts, this time we look at the problems a taxpayer who tries to hand file a return can run into getting that done correctly.  In the case of Allnut, Sr. v. Commissioner, 2008-1 USTC ¶50,310 the taxpayer failed to make delivery as required by the regulations, and the court found that what the taxpayer had to live with the date a document could finally be documented as being in the District Director's office--which was less than year years before the date the IRS issued an assessment.

Materials for this week are available at http://www.edzollars.com/2008-05-09_Hand_Carried.pdf.

The podcast is sponsored by Leimberg Information Services, located at http://www.leimbergservices.com .

Partnership taxation is one of those areas where things may not work exactly as many practitioners expect, and those unexpected workings are things that tax shelter promoters have attempted to make use of.  But if you are going to try and use the technical details of the tax law to force the IRS to grant you a tax benefit that otherwise doesn't seem like something that should happen, it's helpful to follow the detailed requirements yourself. 

Unfortunately for the taxpayer in 7050 Ltd. v. Commissioner, TC Memo 2008-12, that didn't quite happen--and while one bullet was dodged, another problem proved fatal to the benefit the taxpayer was after, and the court never had to deal with whether the shelter actually would have worked if executed as it was supposed to have been.

The materials are available at http://www.ezollars.com/2008-05-05_Sloppy.pdf .

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