This will not be a political piece. There are enough of those. But as just about everyone knows, on July 1 the New York attorney general and district attorney indicted both the Trump Organization and its chief financial officer on charges of income tax evasion. The gravamen of the charges is that the Trump Organization
Taxes
THE ILLUSORY TALE OF THE BIDEN TAX CREDIT
By Mark Ashton on
This weekend brought a report from an outlet called BGR Media about the child tax credits that are due to start hitting bank accounts in the next few weeks. This child tax credit, unlike all its predecessors, is being paid to eligible recipients in advance; typically, at the rate of $250-$300 a month depending…
DANTE’S DEDUCTION: Or Did You Mean A Credit?
By Mark Ashton on
There is hope that the plague is behind us. Pestilence is on its way either in the form of a lantern fly or the return of the cicada after 17 years of peace. For the divorce lawyer and his friend in crime, the accountant, there is another crisis emerging. It’s the war over who gets…
ARM WRESTLING OVER THE DEPENDENCY EXEMPTION?
By Mark Ashton on
There are still things to discover about the 2017 Tax Reform passed by Congress late in that year. The bar and the accounting community have spilled lots of ink over the changes to the law affecting alimony and many other lesser issues. One of those issues is the temporary disappearance of the longstanding dependency deduction/exemption. …
Defining Net Income for 2020 is Going to Be “A Problem”
By Mark Ashton on
I attended a seminar offered by accountant, Mitchell E. Benson, CPA, MT, CFF (Savran Benson LLP), Brian C. Vertz, Esquire (Pollock Begg) and Aliah Molczan (Savran Benson LLP) on July 9, 2020. One of the topics discussed was the Payroll Protection Plan (PPP) loans, which were distributed in the second quarter of 2020 to allow…
CARES Act Check Garnished if Child Support Owed
By Aaron Weems on
Pennsylvania has a host of ways to recover delinquent child support ranging from seizure of bank accounts, gambling winnings, personal injury awards, and the sale proceeds of a home, to intercepting tax refunds, suspending professional, occupational, or recreational licenses. The worst or most consistent offenders will also be thrown in jail.
FINANCIAL INFIDELITY: CHAPTER 2
By Mark Ashton on
As I started this, it occurred to me that I had been to this topic before. Last April 19 I reported on a story published by PBS about spouses who accumulate debt in secret and then want to “share” the debt when the marriage collapses. The February 2020 issue of The Magazine of the American…
TAX REFORM + 2: WHAT DOES IT MEAN & WHERE DOES THE AVERAGE JOE STAND?
By Mark Ashton on
Since the most recent tax reform was adopted in December 2017, this writer has been wondering what it really meant to average people. My averages will be a bit on the high side, but when I ran across a 1995 tax table I decided to try running some tests. Here are the results and I…
Countdown for Tax Reform: How It May Affect You
By Mark Ashton on
Just before Christmas last year, Congress passed and the President signed a major tax reform package that contained a surprising wrinkle. It abandoned a decades long provision that permitted payors of alimony or spousal support to deduct their payments from income and required recipients to report the payments and pay tax on them.
The effective…
The Tail that May Not End
By Mark Ashton on
Every year, both in April and in October, divorce lawyers face a dilemma. While April is the official tax deadline, just about everyone knows that “complex” returns are almost never complete when spring rolls around and many filers defer to October. But, when couples split they often ask for the first time whether they should…