thewayne | Entries tagged with taxes

Well, it's not a cool function, it's an option on a function. Specifically, the Weekday function.

I'm finishing up our taxes. Normally I'd finish them in February or March, but it's been a heck of a few months. One of the things that I do is dump all my prescription drug purchases into a spreadsheet and calculate the day of the week, so I can take a mileage deduction on my state taxes for weekend pickups since I'm not working those days.

Nevermind whether or not we're going to dinner or a movie....

Anyway, the function ends up being:

=IF(WEEKDAY(A1,2)>5,42,"")

A1 is my date field of when the transaction takes place. By default, i.e. without a number changing the day of the week for the date the starting DOW is Sunday = 1. By supplying the 2, you're telling Excel that Monday = 1, therefore if the DOW is greater than 5, it's Saturday or Sunday, therefore the weekend! If that's true, plug in 42 (round trip to Alamogordo and back), otherwise make it a blank cell.

Five trips for an additional 210 miles, at $0.21 per mile towards my state taxes! I have to manually eliminate dupes for multiple transactions on the same day, being multiple drugs refilled and picked up at the same time.

I use spreadsheets a fair amount, but not for anything particularly complex, just as a general purpose tool, so I was kinda chuffed to find this. The question is whether or not I'll remember it for next year!

This is interesting. Crypto currency, in general, is a Ponzi scheme. Bitcoin's biggest uses are criminal, which tells you a lot about it. And overall it's incredibly energy-intensive to generate crypto. I put that caveat there as Etherium did a modification to their code that greatly reduces power consumption. But overall, the point stands.

There's a crypto operation in New York State that bought an old coal-fired power plant for the sole purpose of powering crypto mining rigs!!! And it's hard to regulate its pollution because it is technically no longer a power plant in that it is not generating power for the grid. It was shut down because it was too expensive to remediate its emissions. China made crypto mining and transacting completely illegal, lots of those rigs ended up in Texas and other states in the USA that have inexpensive power.

The tax would be phased in by 10% jumps annually over the next three years.

https://www.engadget.com/white-house-proposes-30-percent-tax-on-electricity-used-for-crypto-mining-090342986.html

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/05/05/2237206/white-house-proposes-30-tax-on-electricity-used-for-crypto-mining

The process is known as washing, wherein people who makes lots of money buy crypto, which loses value, and they take a tax loss. Except they're able to legally buy the same exact brand of cryptocurrency again and go into a wash, rinse, repeat cycle.

Closing this loophole could generate $24billion, I'm not sure if that's annually.

https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/03/09/biden-budget-plan-would-close-crypto-tax-loss-harvesting-loophole/

H&R was running a discount for online filing that expired tonight, so it was time to finish up my spreadsheet and get it done.

I was very paranoid that the changes would hit us hard, but we did pretty good. The thing that kind of shocked me was that I/we drove over EIGHTY-FIVE HUNDRED MILES for medical transport last year! That's almost entirely back and forth to Las Cruces for all of those sinus infections, the sinus surgery and follow-up, plus the cancer scare.

Theoretically it would be deductible at the mileage rate, but since we can't itemize, it doesn't do me any good. Still, it's quite a number! I could drive to England and half the way back, but my car would get kind of soggy.

And I discovered a rather interesting and scary thing about my medical/pharmacy insurance, but I'll save that for another day...

Crossposts: https://thewayne.livejournal.com/1127028.html

In this post by Krebs, he explains how criminals are pre-empting the tax returns of Americans. I have no idea if this is also being done in other countries, a lot would rely upon whether those countries have the ability to electronically file returns.

In brief, the criminals steal information from a company's HR department through various hacking approaches. They get the social security numbers, dates of birth, info on dependents, etc., of employees, then they electronically transmit a tax return to the IRS, using H&R Block's service, and get the refund transmitted to a disposable credit card. When the victim sends in their return, they're informed by the IRS that they've already received a return for them. Then the fun begins for the victim: tons of government paperwork, notifying authorities, etc. The IRS has the ability to apply for a PIN that must be supplied with returns before they'll be accepted, but it appears that you have to be a victim of this type of fraud first before you can apply, and it looks like the PIN may only be good for one year.

In one case mentioned in the article, the unidentified company's HR systems were being hosted on a cloud, this also seems to be a common factor.

The way the fraudsters get their money is a bit cumbersome, but it works out for them in the end. The credit card with the fraudulent money on it is used to buy merchandise, which is either returned for cash or sold for cash, making the money disappear. The money mule (the person with the card) gets a percentage of sales, then uses Western Union or similar service to transmit the money to the criminals. The mule is also a criminal, as they're aiding and abetting a felony, but some of them are not aware of what they're involved in. A lot of spam messages for 'owning your own business at home' are sometimes fronts for these operations.

Obviously there's nothing an individual can do to protect their employer's HR department, about the only thing the average person can do is file their tax returns as early as possible. In the United States, anyone who owes you a tax form is required by law to get it to you by the end of January, usually you have all in hand by the middle of the month. So don't procrastinate.

http://krebsonsecurity.com/2014/04/crimeware-helps-file-fraudulent-tax-returns/

"The Founding Fathers...put certain restrictions on who gets the right to vote. It wasn't you were just a citizen and got to vote...One of those was you had to be a property owner. And that makes a lot of sense, because if you're a property owner you actually have a vested stake in the community."
-- Tea Party Nation president Judson Phillips

"The Tom Perkins system is: You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes... But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars, you get a million votes."
-- Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tom Perkins

Perkins is quite an amusing guy. There's one weakness to his argument, though: corporations like GE don't pay taxes. Lots of big corps cook their books via off-shore entities that they don't pay taxes at all. So even in Tom's world, they wouldn't get a vote under their current business practices.

So in Tom's world, we'd actually have corps paying a lot more tax. That would be interesting.

Gee, ya think? "...54 percent of those surveyed say Bush is responsible for the "current condition" of the economy, compared to just 27 percent who blame Obama. Among self-described independent voters, a key 2012 voting bloc, the number shifts slightly: 49 percent point the finger at the former GOP president, while 24 percent blame Obama."

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/voters-blame-bush-more-obama-economy-143014602.html

Here's the stupid thing: when we had a default in the 80's due to an accounting/computer error, THE ADDITIONAL INTEREST NEVER WENT AWAY. It wasn't much, I believe the number that I heard was 0.03%, or maybe 0.3% (yes, hundredths of a percent), but it was on THE ENTIRE DEBT, not just the amount that was defaulted on. I heard a report that studied this specific time frame, and they couldn't see the higher interest rate ever going away due to the constant fluctuations of interest rates.

Congress raised the debt limit SEVEN TIMES for Bush. They'd better get off their butts and raise it for Obama, or they're REALLY going to see an economy tank! They're also going to have to cut sacred cows like defense and some entitlement programs because that's where the real money is, not this nickle and diming that they're trying to pass as substantial cuts.

I think if Congress doesn't raise the debt ceiling they're pretty much going to guarantee a (D) win in next year's elections and could well totally turn the country against them.

"Barack Obama has squared up for a major battle with big business, announcing a crackdown on offshore tax avoidance and evasion by US multinationals that's designed to raise $210B and make it easier for companies to create 'good jobs here at home'. Obama cited a building in the Cayman Islands where more than 18,000 US companies are housed: 'Either this is the biggest building in the world or it is the biggest tax scam in the world,' he said. 'I think the American people know which it is.' The administration says that more than a third of US foreign profits in 2003 came from Bermuda, the Netherlands and Ireland, and noted US companies paid an effective tax rate of just 2.3% on the $700bn they earned in foreign profits in 2004. Among tech companies affected by the crackdown, Microsoft joined 200 companies who signed a letter complaining that the proposed tax changes would put them at a disadvantage with their rivals, Cisco moaned that the measures 'would adversely impact our ability to invest and grow our business in the US,' and Google declined to comment for the time being."

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/04/2031252&art_pos=9

I find this so funny. Microsoft complaining that paying higher taxes will put them at a disadvantage with their rivals? WHAT RIVALS?!

How many of these companies are wanting Federal stimulus/bailout money? Microsoft opened an office in Ireland that consists of an attorney and his staff, and that's now their European HQ and shitloads of money from European sales get funneled through it because Ireland has a lower tax rate. How about Halliburton moving their HQ to Qatar "so it's closer to their major operations"? (ignoring the obvious aspect of it's a safe-haven if any current or former executives come close to getting indicted for war crimes) And let's throw in another Microsoft story: they couldn't get the H1B Visa cap raised or an exemption so they could hire more foreign workers and bring them here, so they opened a center in Canada, an hour's flight from their Washington HQ.

They not only want to have their cake and eat it too, they want everyone else to buy their cake for them. Sorry! If you want to be an American corporation or citizen, then you need to help fund the American government through taxes at both the Federal and local levels and you need to help create JOBS HERE. I have no problem with helping create jobs in other countries, but when you move most of your operations to countries with less expensive work forces -- I have a problem with that.

And while they're at it, if the company's HQ is not on American soil paying taxes, un-ass their lobbyists from Congress. If you're not an American corporation or concern, then you should get your government to represent you through diplomatic channels. And also skew government procurement to American corporations based on American soil: if you want the American government to give your corp money, then you'd damn well better base your corp here and pay reasonable taxes on it.

Gee, maybe if Microsoft payed more in taxes to the American government, which helps fund universities, we would have higher quality IT graduates and they wouldn't complain that they MUST hire H1B's because the quality of the American work force isn't good enough.

Maybe taxes are high, there's certainly no doubt that the tax code is so labyrinthine that no one can easily answer that question. For some categories of people they certainly are, self-employed get hit pretty hard and some things like that should be re-evaluated and changed. But corporations have been dodging taxes for far too long, they need to start paying. Among the many things that Obama wants to reform is the tax code, and I say hooray for that! But corporations have got to pay their share of taxes, there's no other way around it.

OK, Deb! Flame away! :-)