Whistle blower

Help them cheat, then turn them in?

I knew there was such a thing as an IRS whistle blower, but i didn’t know it was it’s own cottage industry. Which it apparently is. But I’m really having a hard time figuring out how it worked.

GINSBURG, Senior Circuit Judge.

“The Appellant asked to proceed anonymously before the Tax Court when challenging the decision of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to deny his application for a whistleblower award. The Tax Court denied his request, concluding the balance of interests weighed against anonymity because the Appellant is a “serial filer” of whistleblower claims, which he bases upon publicly available information. The Tax Court’s rationale was that if it does not “identify serial filers by name, the public will be unable to judge accurately the extent to which the serial filer phenomenon has affected the work of the Tax Court.” Whistleblower 14377-16W v. Comm’r, 148 T.C. 510, 518-19 (2017).

Read more here.

My experience with cheating clients

If you’ve ever had clients tell you how to do your job, you can probably relate to this. Of course when it comes to taxation, it involves criminal charges with jail sentences. So I don’t go there. This year, I had a fairly successful client in the cannabis industry that tried to talk me into cheating in three different ways.

1. First, he wanted to deduct ah investment he made in a company that was still operating and paying taxes. He claimed, probably correctly, he paid more than it was worth and wanted to deduct the difference. That would work for GAAP, but not for taxes. For tax, that’s a violation of law.
2. Second he found a tax preparer who was willing to play loosey-goosey with 280(e), which limits the deductions that a cannabis business can deduct. He told me top notch cannabis preparers were paying less attention to 280(e). I checked around and some of the top people in cannabis taxation said it was bullshit, as I expected. It ‘s against the law to ignore 280(e). Of course you can do all kinds of things with 280(e), but you can’t just ignore what it says.
3. Third, he wanted us to deduct accrued interest in a cash basis company. Accruals can only be deducted in an accrual basis company.

In everyone of those situations, I could lose my ticket. All of them involved thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax.

I refused, he got angry, left and started bad mouthing me.

Summary

If an accredited tax preparer helps a client cheat, they are both liable. The taxpayer for preparing a false return, and the taxpayer for providing false information.  If the client lies to the tax preparer and fails to product the documents, the tax preparer is still liable for not getting the documents. I see no way the tax preparer escapes unscathed.

How it should work

If someone goes to a tax preparer with the intention of cheating, it is the tax professional’s responsibility to tell the taxpayer(s) they could go to jail for cheating. If they persist, the tax preparers should resign from the engagement.

Something else that surprises me is this. The whistle blower bases his claims on “publicly available information.  I’m not sure what that means. Apparently this guy was a tax preparer and used publicly available information to turn in his clients for a reward.

This does not sound like the entire story. i’m guessing there is more here than meets the eye.

And why would the preparer want anonymity?

I have no inkling what the underlying facts are in the court case that started this blog post off. It raised some interesting issues that I don’t understand how the preparer got around. Of course, I’m not going to turn my client in, but I wouldn’t feel bad if someone else did.

One other thing.

I know a person who was very high profile in American politics that was convicted of tax fraud 15 years ago, and he is still in prison. He is likely to die there.

Don’t go there.

A better approach that I suspect is used from time to time, is to simply not pay your taxes. Wait a few years and settle for pennies on the dollar. I don’t ever advise that, but I know it happens.