Hi All,
Nobody likes taxes. However, there are right ways and wrong ways to reduce your tax burden. The right way to cut your taxes is to take all legally allowable deductions, the wrong way to do it is to engage in fraud. Here eight signs that indicate someone might be cheating on their taxes.
1) Understating income by denying its receipt and then not being able to offer a satisfactory explanation for the omission.
2) Concealing accounts with banks, brokerage firms or hiding ownership of property.
3) Repeatedly failing to make deposit receipts into business accounts.
4) Manipulating personal expenses to appear as business expenses.
5) Taking excessive religious and charitable donations.
6) Showing substantial unexplained increases in net worth over a period of years.
7) Showing a large excess of personal expenditures over available resources.
8) Failing to file a return, especially over several years , while receiving substantial amounts of taxable income.
Tax evasion is a serious crime. Billionaire Leona Helmsley the “Queen of Mean” spent 19 months in federal prison for claiming personal expenses as business expenses (here). Mobster Al-Capone was sent to Alcatraz Island, as he could not account for the source of his $100 million dollars in illicit income- that’s 1.2 Billion in today’s money with inflation factored in (here).
Best,
James
