Back in 2007, the IRS and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) were hot on the heels of Switzerland-based mega financial institutions like UBS, Credit Suisse, and Wegelin for assisting wealthy Americans in hiding billions of dollars in foreign accounts. Part of the fallout included the enactment of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010, which requires all foreign banks to file reports with the IRS on all American accounts over $50,000. Americans must also file the disclosure separately on their yearly returns. Failure to report results in a 40 percent penalty for the account holder and even…
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With all it does to prevent fraudulent tax returns, the IRS still paid out $5.2 billion in identity theft refunds in 2013. As if that wasn’t a big enough headache, imagine all the bureaucratic backtracking tens of millions of Americans who had their identity and cash stolen had to go through. Actually, that sum is just an estimate because the General Accounting Office (GAO) says that it’s impossible to know the full extent of identity theft tax refunds because of the challenges associated with detecting the crime. What is known for sure is that Florida is headquarters for the…
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When it was announced in August that fast food giant Burger King had purchased Tim Horton’s, a Canadian coffee and doughnut chain, for $8.4 billion and was moving its headquarters from the U.S. to Canada, it surprised some, but shocked no one. What it did do was irritate lots of people in Congress. Some called the plan of America’s second-largest fast food chain to move out of the country unpatriotic, but beneath all the bluster, the outrage was all about lost tax revenue. The idea of a national corporation moving its main offices out of the country isn’t new,…