It has been an interesting week in tax news this final week of 2011. The last week of the year is always a big one in the tax relief industry since we have just days to take action to lower our 2011 tax bill. Here are  some of the top headlines that caught my attention this week:
IRS sues Yankees’ Hal Steinbrenner over tax refund
New York Yankees
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Washington Redskins wide receiver Santana Moss has had an up and down week. On Sunday, Moss caught two passes for 40 yards with a touchdown in the Washington Redskins’ 23-10 win over the New York Giants. On a down note, the Detroit News reported that the elite receiver owes the IRS $258,017 in back taxes. According the source, the IRS filed a tax lean in November against Moss’s $5.2
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Celebrity rapper and actor Ja Rule was sentenced to 28 months in prison and ordered to pay 1.1 million dollars in unpaid taxes on Monday. Ja Rule was quoted by the Associated Press as saying; “I was a young man who made a lot of money — I’m getting a little choked up — I didn’t know how to deal with these finances, and I didn’t have people to guide
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Actor Wesley Snipes’ request for an appeal for a 3-year prison term was rejected by the Supreme Court in the beginning of June. Snipes was sentenced to prison until 2013 after his 2008 trial conviction of three misdemeanor charges of willful failure to file income tax returns from 1999 to 2001. Tax Resolution first blogged about Snipes’ IRS tax problems here.
If you owe money to the IRS, especially $25,000 or
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Earlier this week, I kicked off the Tax Resolution Tax Day Countdown with Russ and Sully on the Big Biz Show by talking about celebrity tax woes and what we can learn from them.
Unlike what the tabloids may suggest, celebrities don’t get better or worse treatment from the IRS than regular Joe Six-Packs. But what IS different is that the IRS leverages the celebrity of the name as a deterrent
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Is any publicity really good publicity?
This year alone, celebrity tax woes has caught taxpayers’ eyes from coast to coast and even abroad. Earlier this month, our team’s national tax expert Brian Compton was quoted in HowStuffWorks on how celebrities get in IRS trouble and why average taxpayers need to beware.
According to the HowStuffWorks article, celebrities meet their tax problems in various ways: “the oblivious (Nic Cage: I’m just an entertainer!),
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Wesley Snipes is going to prison.
For three years.
For unpaid back taxes.
You know who I’m talking about. Snipes, the star of Blade and White Men Can’t Jump, was convicted of willfully failing to pay taxes on $38 million of income for the tax years 1999 to 2001.
After a judge rejected his appeal, Snipes was ordered to turn himself into federal authorities and begin his three-year prison sentence.
People who track tax protestors
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With only less than 2 months left before the year is over, I’d like to take a moment and re-capture some of our top blog posts from last month. These are the tax help blog posts that received the most visits–so in case you missed it the first time around, here comes the round-up:
What To Do Before the October 15th Tax Extension Deadline if You Need Tax Help for Unfiled
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With a record enforcement budget, the IRS is serious about collecting back taxes and penalizing those who have inadvertently or deliberately evaded their tax payments. A-list celebrities like Wesley Snipes, Paul Hogan, Reggie Bush and many others have faced severe IRS charges and penalties for evading large sums of tax payments.
The media loves to play up the distress of big-name tax evaders who have been caught by the IRS, but
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The super-rich and famous are getting schooled by the IRS left and right nowadays since the agency stepped up its game in recent years to collect unpaid back taxes. Recently, the IRS filed a $63,487 lien against international supermodel Naomi Campbell for unpaid back taxes in 2009.
According to the New York Post, “the IRS filed a $63,487 lien against her last month with the New York City Register’s office for
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We know that bad things can happen to good people–after all, it’s a part of life! What many taxpayers may not know is that the IRS is indiscriminately aggressive when it comes to chasing tax evaders–whether you’re a multi-million dollar celebrity or a Joe Six-Pack. It’s easy to erroneously believe that the IRS is too busy to scrutinize the “small fries” and will instead focus only on catching “The Big
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