Offshore Tax Gap?
US citizens in rush for offshore tax advice – Ohio CPA Dana Stahl forwarded this to me with the following message:
Mr Guru - Obama's war on the rich in the USA continues.
While that is obviously true, what caught my attention was the following reference to my old bugaboo, the tax gap:
A Senate committee has estimated that the parking of assets offshore costs the US $100bn in lost taxes each year.
As I have been explaining for decades, any “tax gap” is by definition impossible to know with any certainty. Any figure that is being bandied about has either been pulled out of some politician’s rectum or is merely a WAG (wild ass guess). Of course, that's SOP for our rulers in DC, as illustrated by the health care reform discussions. None of those figures has any relation to reality.
Labels: TaxGap
IRS Too Nice?
From Ohio CPA Dana Stahl:
Mr Guru - thought you'd find this interesting, but full of bulls**t!
Has the IRS lost its appetite for collecting payroll tax?
DS
My Reply:
Dana:
That article sounds so similar to all of the other scare stories on the dreaded tax gap crisis, and about as accurate, using fabricated numbers as a justification for giving IRS more Draconian powers than they already have.
Kerry