Daily Archives: 5 July 2016

Schedule Destruction

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In the course of a court-ordered (because the lady was unwilling to talk otherwise) deposition before Judicial Watch pursuant to a FOIA lawsuit (because the State Department was refusing otherwise to follow the law and provide the requested information or any reason why not), Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s close aid Huma Abedin said that Clinton had destroyed—”burned”—several pages of her Secretary of State calendar’s schedule.

If there was a schedule that was created that was her Secretary of State daily schedule, and a copy of that was then put in the burn bag, that…that certainly happened on…on more than one occasion[.]

Only copies?  That likely would be OK.  But how do we know that only copies were burned?  After all, Clinton already has said she destroyed 30,000 emails that she claims were personal—with no way anyone else can know these documents in fact were personal; Clinton did the destruction by herself, without so much as a fare-thee-well to State before she’d done it.

With an honest DoJ, this would raise questions of evidence tampering.

Hmm….

Tax Complexity

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A Private Letter Ruling is a letter the IRS issues to a particular taxpayer—corporate or business—to provide specific instructions/clearance to a specific taxpayer about that taxpayer’s particular circumstance.  PLRs set no precedent for any other taxpayer; even if that other has a substantially similar circumstance.  The price for such a Letter, charged by the IRS to the Letter’s recipient, ranges from $2,200 to $28,300.

The procedure for getting a PLR is set out in Internal Revenue Bulletin:  2016-1, which runs past 260 .pdf pages (the Table of Contents runs nearly 6 pages).  There’s a hint there.

Here’s another hint, from the opening paragraph of 2016-1‘s Section 1, which lays out the purpose of this procedure:

This revenue procedure explains how the Service provides advice to taxpayers on issues under the jurisdiction of the Associate Chief Counsel (Corporate), the Associate Chief Counsel (Financial Institutions and Products), the Associate Chief Counsel (Income Tax and Accounting), the Associate Chief Counsel (International), the Associate Chief Counsel (Passthroughs and Special Industries), the Associate Chief Counsel (Procedure and Administration), and the Associate Chief Counsel (Tax Exempt and Government Entities). It explains the forms of advice and the manner in which advice is requested by taxpayers and provided by the Service. A sample format for a letter ruling request is provided in Appendix B. See section 4 of this revenue procedure for information on certain issues outside the scope of this revenue procedure on which advice may be requested under a different revenue procedure.

Seven different tax specialist head lawyers are needed by the IRS to explain the IRS’ own tax rules to prospective tax advice seekers.

Hmm….