When I looked back at my blog posts I realized that I have not written a Memorial Day essay every year since MauledAgain came into existence. Considering that I have posted something for (almost) every Thanksgiving and Halloween, I let myself ponder why the difference. I concluded that my posting for various events and holidays are episodic and that every year something has happened for Halloween and Thanksgiving, but that it hasn’t happened for other holidays. Perhaps it’s simply a matter of what catches my attention. Three years ago, in The Price of Freedom Is Much More Than Taxes. I address ..read more

As readers of this blog know, I am not a fan of these public-private partnerships. I have explained my objections to public-private partnerships and privatization of public functions in posts such as Are Private Tolls More Efficient Than Public Tolls?, When Privatization Fails: Yet Another Example, How Privatization Works: It Fails the Taxpayers and Benefits the Private Sector, Privatization is Not the Answer to Toll Bridge Problems, When Potholes Meet Privatization, Will Private Ownership of Public Necessities Work?, and So Who Decides If Tolls Can Be Imposed on Pennsylvania Bridges?. These p ..read more

Most people, when they hear the word “tax,” think not only of their distaste for paying taxes but also think of “numbers.” Sadly, many people dislike and even fear working with numbers. Anyone who has worked with taxes knows that taxes involve much more than numbers. They also know that although computers can handle the computational side of tax numbers, the non-numerical aspects of taxation require the sort of policy, judgment, wisdom, and subjective evaluation that have yet to show up successfully in software. I have written about this misunderstanding of taxation in Why Tax Practitioners Mu ..read more

From time to time I have shared my thought about tax return preparers, particularly those who get into trouble. Sometime my focus is on the clients who end up being shortchanged by tax return preparers whose actions cause the clients to undergo audits that they would not have experienced had their returns been properly filed. I don’t write about every tax return preparer who is convicted, because in recent years that has been happening with increasing frequency. Most of the press releases don’t add new wrinkles but fall into the “here’s another one who did the same thing as the last several wh ..read more

Those who read MauledAgain are familiar with my opposition to public funding of, and tax breaks for, businesses owned by multimillionaires and billionaires, as explained in previous commentaries, including Tax Revenues and D.C. Baseball, four years ago in Putting Tax Money Where the Tax Mouth Is, Taking Tax Money Without Giving Back: Another Reality, and Public Financing of Private Sports Enterprises: Good for the Private, Bad for the Public, Taking and Giving Back, If You Want a Professional Sports Team, Pay For It Yourselves; Don’t Grab Tax Dollars, Is Tax and Spend Acceptable When It’s “Tax ..read more

The concept of a mileage-based road fee continues to get my support and continues to be attacked by people who, in my opinion, either do not understand how it works or who haven’t bothered to dig into the details rather than offering coined phrases invented by the anti-tax lobbyists. I have been following and commenting on this issue for many years in posts such as Tax Meets Technology on the Road, Mileage-Based Road Fees, Again, Mileage-Based Road Fees, Yet Again, Change, Tax, Mileage-Based Road Fees, and Secrecy, Pennsylvania State Gasoline Tax Increase: The Last Hurrah?, Making Progress wit ..read more

It indeed is worrisome that misinformation has infected society. Worse, the ability to critically analyze information is headed into extinction. A recent example is the claim that because corporations are closing stores the economy is in shambles. Let’s first look at retail store closings. Why do stores close? They close for a variety of reasons. One significant cause is the transfer of shopping from retail store browsing and purchasing to online browsing and purchasing. That doesn’t mean the economy is slowing down or speeding up. It simply means that the marketplace has been moving. As older ..read more

Readers of MauledAgain know that one of my “hobbies,” surely overshadowing all the others, is genealogy. Specifically, genealogy of people and their families. There also are house and property genealogies. Though I’ve known about them, I have never tried to research the genealogy of a house. Until now. On Friday, the weekly Delaware County (Pennsylvania) Council Public Relations newsletter arrived with an item explaining that it had upgraded its online property records search engine. The website permits a person to deeds, mortgages, and other documents online rather than making a trip to the c ..read more

Reader Morris contacted me with this message, “Maybe the IRS reads your blog posts.” He reminded me of a commentary on this blog from March of 2020, Fortune Cookies and Taxes and pointed me in the direction of a story on Bloomberg Tax from December of last year. My March 2020 commentary addressed an experience reader Morris had when he went to his “regular Chinese restaurant,” and found in his fortune cookie a message, “Tax tip # 8 Travel could be considered a business expense. Even that island vacay. TaxAct Surprisingly legal. Start for Free: TaxAct.com” Doing some research, I discovered that ..read more

Almost always, when I write about tax return preparers who have crossed the line, it involves businesses operated by one or a few individuals. Occasionally it involves a franchise of a much larger entity. I have written about the woes of tax return preparers in posts such as Tax Fraud Is Not Sacred, More Tax Return Preparation Gone Bad, Another Tax Return Preparation Enterprise Gone Bad, Are They Turning Up the Heat on Tax Return Preparers?, Surely There Is More to This Tax Fraud Indictment, Need a Tax Return Preparer? Don’t Use a Current IRS Employee, Is This How Tax Return Preparation Fraud ..read more