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Master This Green!

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The calendar may say that spring officially begins on March 21. But for millions of golfers across the country, the season didn't really start until this weekend — specifically, when Bubba Watson outplayed 20-year-old phenom Jordan Spieth to claim his second green jacket at the 2014 Masters.

Augusta National Country Club, home of the Masters, is America's temple of golf. Augusta's "perennial ryegrass" fairways are manicured to a smoother finish than your living room carpet, and its greens are so hard and fast you could play billiards on them. So, with all that lush green stretching as far as the eye can see, would it surprise you to learn that the residents of Augusta have "mastered" a lucrative tax break? It's become so identified with the legendary golf tournament that it's known as "the Augusta rule." But if you own your own business, you may be able to take advantage of it yourself.

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Fall into a Fortune

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Getting an audit notice is never anyone's idea of fun. But getting audited isn't always the disaster it might seem. In fact, for fiscal 2012, 107,820 lucky winners got refunds after their audits. Granted, that's still shy of seven percent of everyone audited that year. But it proves you can walk away from the IRS a winner.

Here's a clever strategy one taxpayer used to walk away from the IRS with a windfall. But you might want to be careful before you try it yourself!

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A Little Bit of Tax

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It seems like every day brings new questions about the digital currency called bitcoin, which first appeared in 2009. Who is the shadowy "Satoshi Nakamoto" who created the currency's protocol and software? Who stole $450 million worth of bitcoin from the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox exchange? Who was the mystery buyer who used bitcoin to snag a $500,000 house on the Indonesian island of Bali?

Last week, the IRS solved a mystery by ruling on how bitcoin would be taxed, at least here in the United States. And their answer to that question may shoot a hole in bitcoin's hope to become more widely accepted.

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The verdict is in... Bitcoin will be taxed as property, not as currency

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We have had more than a few clients this past year ask about Bitcoin and trading in Bitcoins from an income tax perspective.  There has been a lot of urban legends out there that claim, since the IRS has not given any formal guidance, that income taxes don't apply. Like most urban legends, that is simply wrong and making that assumption can land you in some real tax trouble.

When we delivered that news it was sometimes not what our client, or prospective client, wanted to hear. We've had to remind everyone that the primary premise of the U.S. Tax Code, Section 61, is pretty simple. It says that "gross income means all income from whatever source derived." So, unless there is a specific exclusion from taxability for the income source, you're on the hook for taxes.

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Fast Track to the Presidency

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Last week, we talked about the IRS Criminal Investigation unit's Fiscal 2013 annual report. We told you about four of the 2,812 offenders who drew prison sentences for their efforts: the drag racer who applied for $83 million in fraudulent gas tax refunds, the surgeon who "operated" on his tax bill using foreign trusts and shell companies, the Japanese restaurant owner who hid receipts in boxes marked "seasoned octopus," and the prisoner who filed false tax returns for his fellow inmates and sent the refund checks to his mother. But the IRS report detailed over 100 such stories — so, at the risk of beating a dead horse, we couldn't resist sharing just a few more:

  • They say everything is bigger in Texas. Apparently that includes public corruption, which is an IRS priority. Abel Limas was a former police officer and state judge in Brownsville who discovered he could supplement his government salary by turning his office into "a criminal enterprise to enrich himself and others through extortion." In 2008, Limas issued a series of pretrial rulings in a case involving a helicopter crash. Later that year, he joined a law firm working on behalf of victims in that same crash. It turns out the law firm had promised him a cool hundred grand, plus a share of their fees, in exchange for those rulings. Now Limas is spending six years in a federal prison camp.

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Largest IRS Phone Scam Spreading

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It is tax preparation season and the scammers our there know that taxes are weighing heavy on the minds of many taxpayers. The scammers are relying on the fact that you are thinking about taxes and the IRS right now.

Yesterday the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) is warning all taxpayers to beware of phone calls from individuals who claim to represent the Internal Revenue Service, but in reality are trying to defraud you, in what it is saying is the largest ever scam it has seen to-date.

“This is the largest scam of its kind that we have ever seen,” said TIGTA Inspector General J. Russell George in a statement. He commented that TIGTA has thus far received reports of over 20,000 contacts and is aware of thousands of victims who have collectively paid over $1 million (and climbing) as a result of the scam.