A line from President Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address on March 4, 1865, “To care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan,” was the mission statement for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (“VA”) for decades. The VA offers many different benefits to those who served in…
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None of us know how long we are going to live. This uncertainty makes planning for long term care a daunting task, especially since the average cost of a nursing home in Mississippi is over $7,000 a month.[1] Some may have purchased long-term care insurance to cover most of these costs. For many individuals, applying…
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We have covered timing and delivery issues in several articles, such as the recent Demuth and Hoensheid cases.[1] Similarly, the recent Tax Court case of Gage v. Comm’r dealt with the taxpayers that believed they paid a $875,000 settlement to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) in December of 2012.[2] Unfortunately for the…
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Every year the IRS publishes its list of the top tax scams that taxpayers should be aware of, known as the Dirty Dozen. I discussed the IRS’s 2021 Dirty Dozen list in a prior web article,[1] and the IRS has recently released its 2023 Dirty Dozen list.[2] Several of these scams are designed to steal…
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While most people know the phrase not everything you read on the internet is true, many don’t know what can actually be relied upon in a legal setting. A reasonable person might think the instructions on an IRS publication or a web article or website published by a credible source, such as an accounting or…
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This article is likely the final in my series on the probate and estate administration processes in Mississippi and discusses several of the potential complications one might encounter in the probate process. As mentioned in my previous article on the general probate process in Mississippi, the term “probate” technically only refers to the process of…
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Reasonable compensation has been a relatively hot topic this year. Charles Allen previously discussed the Blossom case in which the taxpayers were penalized for understating the compensation of the two owners/officers of an S corporation.[1] While Charles’s discussion focused on employment taxation, Josh Sage followed up with an article on the resulting income taxation consequences…
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As mentioned in my previous article on the general probate process in Mississippi, the term “probate” technically only refers to the process of proving a will as valid.[1] However, it is most commonly used as a catch-all term to encapsulate the entire probate and estate administration processes, both for testate and intestate estates. The main…
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Probate, a word that strikes fear into the hearts of untold masses. Everyone knows that probate is an extremely complex, time consuming, and expensive process. But is it really? Certainly, in many circumstances it can be, but such is not always the case. In this article, I will outline the basics of the probate process…
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In Izen v. Comm’r, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals recently affirmed a Tax Court decision to deny a taxpayer’s charitable contribution deduction where the taxpayer failed to meet the statutory documentation requirements for the charitable contribution.[1] The key documentation that the taxpayer lacked was a contemporaneous written acknowledgement that included his taxpayer identification number.…
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