16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Great premise, decent effort, June 14, 2001
Unlike the other reviewers, I liked this book. My biggest problem with it is its length. After hearing a few of the stories, it started to get a bit dull.
In a nutshell, this book is about people who have the money, power and lack of ethics to avoid paying their taxes. The result, of course, is that the rest of us have to make up the hundreds of billions of dollars lost.
This is muckraking in the best sense of the word. This book follows a middle class self-employed taxpayer through the bureaucratic hell caused by bad IRS advice, and her resulting tax bill and then contrasts it with the treatment big-time tax evaders get. If you are an ordinary person, the IRS will go after you. If you can afford fancy lawyers, the IRS is willing to compromise on pennies for the dollar.
This book is a better skim than a read, but it's an important message and the authors have clearly put a lot of work into it.
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14 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A day in the life of the fat cats. . . ., January 14, 2002
The Cheating of America is another superb peice of work by Chuck Lewis and his folks at the Center for Public Integrity. The CPIers reveal (once again) the exploits of the wealthy by constantly asking the question is it tax avoidance, tax evasion or somthing hazy in the middle which is refered to as avoision. The book highlights cases of people who simply aren't paying tax. The Center for Public Integrity doing what it does best . . . .taking every day public documents and going through them with a fine tooth comb - the forgotten art of investigative journalism. KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK!
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33 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Hunt for Loopholes and Ways to Avoid IRS Notice, April 8, 2001
This book is built around the IRS estimate that $190 billion in taxes is not being paid annually. This costs the average family over $1,500 a year in extra taxes to pay for what others don't pay, if the same amount of taxes were collected. The book details off-shore losses in tax havens, trusts designed to shift income, few audits of high-income taxpayers, special tax legislation in Congress, tax-loss carryforwards bought inexpensively, deduction timing methods, charitable trust operations, hiding money offshore, operating with cash, using untraceable Internet accounts, renouncing U.S. citizenship, investment banker- and auditor-led tax shelters, and tax protestor organizations. If you are not familiar with the methods people use to reduce taxes, this will be new information to you. If you are sophisticated about taxes, you will read mostly about cases that have received widespread publicity.
The book builds from two faulty premises. First, that it is a civic duty to pay income taxes just as progressively as the face of the tax law suggests. Most people would agree that if there are legal ways to pay less, that people are entitled to use them. Much of what is condemned in this book is not even controversial in terms of its legality. Honest differences may occur in how these alternatives are applied. Second, that few people should be able to escape the IRS's reach. To do that, we would either have to use a much simpler tax system (like a sales tax) or audit almost all medium and large income taxpayers. That later alternative would require an enormous increase in the size of the IRS and reduce the pleasure of being an American. We would have a tax police state focused on everyone's tax life. I think that few would want to live with that, even if they were not a target in a given year. We've all read the horror stories of what happens now to some unlucky people who run afoul of the IRS.
The book begins with an example of how a complex tax system can go wrong. A woman got a retirement fund distribution, and didn't know how to pay taxes on it. She called the IRS, got faulty advice, and then was hounded to pay up. The IRS mistake was no defense. So, the downside of the current system is that it can victimize those who do not know about taxes. This means we are headed towards a world in which almost everyone who pyas taxes has to employ tax professionals.
I certainly agree with the authors that the egregious tax cheats should be stopped. Interestingly, I'm not so sure that can be accomplished. I am even less sure that it will reduce my taxes. There is a tendency for government to collect as much revenue as possible, even when revenue increases.
I think the book should have focused more on how the current tax system is headed for a collapse because of its complexity and rapid increase in illegal ways to avoid it, and that fairness and funding the government require a new and simpler tax system.
After you have finished this book, also think about how the balance of fairness should work in government. How many guilty people should go free so that one innocent person is not punished? How much discretion should police and prosecutors have? How hard should the IRS try to collect before settling with the unsophisticated?
What is your fair share of the community's burdens? Are you meeting it?
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