Tax Lawyer's Blog

It’s a crazy world we live in.
Denise Lavoie of the Associated Press writes that the Tax Court has ruled that the costs of a sex change operation are tax deductible:
The U.S. Tax Court ruled yesterday that a Massachusetts woman should be allowed to deduct the costs of her sex-change operation, a decision that could have [...]

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Fellow tax blogger Mary O’Keeffe of Bed Buffaloes in Your Tax Code left this question in a comment to my post titled Do You Need a Lawyer?:

Peter, there’s been a lot of press coverage of this case, but none that I’ve seen discusses the fact that the Tax Court opinion for Ms. Singleton-Clark’s case prominently states:
PURSUANT [...]

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Jane Genova of Law and More wonders whether tax lawyers are becoming obsolete (emphasis added):
Lori Singleton-Clarke, a Maryland nurse, took on IRS lawyers and won. What she won was the right to deduct nearly $15,000 tuition for her own MBA and for other professionals to do the same for their business degrees.
As Laura Saunders reports in [...]

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WebCPA reports that Joe Francis of “Girls Gone Wild” fame has filed a lawsuit against the IRS for illegal collection activities (emphasis added):
[S]hortly after the judge accepted his plea deal, the IRS filed a lien for $33,819,087.14 for three years of back taxes, from 2001 to 2003 (see IRS Files $34M Lien Against ‘Girls Gone Wild’ [...]

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Although federal bankruptcy laws supersede state laws, states are allowed to choose whether to apply their own asset exemptions or the federal exemptions. Florida, like most states, opts out of the federal system in favor of it’s own system.
The Bankruptcy Court had ruled that a Florida debtor’s vested interest in her corporation’s Keogh plan was not an exempt asset [...]

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From the L.A. Times:
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday that a prosecutor improperly searched thousands of files in a tax preparer’s office while looking for illegal immigrants who had committed identity theft.
In a 4-3 decision, the court termed the search a violation of privacy and upheld a lower court’s order to throw out evidence against a [...]

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The St. Petersburg Times reports that Pinellas County, Florida taxpayers will pay for a cosmetologist to cover up the potentially offensive tattoos on the face and neck of a neo-Nazi during his murder trial:
Attorneys for John Allen Ditullio Jr. aren’t taking any chances when it comes to the 23-year-old’s homemade tattoos inked since his arrest three [...]

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WebCPA reports Wesley Snipes is appealing his sentence of 3 years imprisonment after his 2008 conviction for failing to file his 1999, 2000 and 2001 federal income tax returns:
Snipes’s lawyers are claiming that the trial should have occurred in New York instead of Florida, as they had argued before the first trial. In addition, Snipes’s attorneys argued [...]

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Florida attorney blogger Jeffrey Kuntz writes about a tax ruling recently handed down by the Utah Supreme Court:
[The Court] released an opinion last week upholding the constitutionality of a Utah statute that taxes businesses in which individuals perform services while nude or partially nude.  However, the court struck a Utah statute that taxed escort services as unconstitutional.Â
Bushco, dba Babydolls [...]

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“Where do I begin to tell the story of how great a love can be?
A true love story that is older than the sea.
Where do I start?”
- Theme from Love Story -
The Tax Court has ruled that it lacks jurisdiction to order the IRS to apologize to a taxpayer:
The Tax Court may exercise jurisdiction only to the extent [...]

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