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Taxation & Estate Planning

: IRS Problem Solver Blog

IRS News in Brief

By Darrin Mish

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IRS Files Lien on Naomi Campbell

The IRS has slapped a $63,487 lien on Naomi Campbell in the New York City Registrar?s Office last month for taxes assessed in 2009. Campbell, who testified at the Hague in Liberian warlord Charles Taylor?s trial that she received some ?dirty looking stones? from him in 1997 must now wish had she kept some of those blood diamonds to pay her tax debts.

A Massive IRS Mistake?

According to IRS records a broke, former Alphabet City hipster who had to borrow money from friends to make ends meet owes $172 million in taxes. Marcos Esparza Bofill, who worked as a day trader in New York and lived in a small shared tenement apartment on East 6th Street in Manhattan, moved back to his native Barcelona in Spain to try to find work as a guitarist there.

According to friends, Bofill was not even making money as a trader and had to borrow money from a family member, then had to borrow money again. The apartment he lived in could only fit one bed inside. And to top it off, Bofill did not even know what ?IRS? stood for when he first learned about the tax bill.

According to IRS documents posted on the website, thesmokinggun.com, Bofill owed the $172,101,056.48 in taxes in 2006 for which he did not file a return. But obviously there has to be some mistake.

One tax expert commented that the figure most probably represented the total amount of sales he handled as a day trader, instead of how much earnings he made. Apparently, this was the typical way the IRS treats returns that aren?t filed.

Judge Rejects Online Religious Group Bid for Tax-free Church Status

The IRS won in a court case for the right not to grant a church status to The Foundation of Human Understanding, a religious group based on Judeo-Christian principles and the doctrines and teachings of its founder, Roy Masters. According to the law, non-profit non-church organizations are subject to greater regulations than are churches. This led to the Foundation?s appeal against the IRS classification of it as a ?non-church?.

But the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that because the Foundation conducts its worship services primarily over the Internet and the radio, it did not pass the association test, which requires that members meet regularly for organized worship. The fact that members listen simultaneously to a broadcasted message over the Internet or the radio does not automatically mean that they associated with each other or worshiped communally.