A new way to earn some extra money: IRS informant - The IRS pays people a portion of the money collected from tax cheats when you give them information that helps catch the fraudsters.

Fast food employee highlights credit card risk – Little machines called “skimmers” make it easy for people to steal your credit card information after you hand your credit card to them.

Prosperity Theology: Gospel or blasphemy? – Exposing the fraud that is “prosperity gospel” or “prosperity theology”.

IRS sends taxpayer an administrative summons. Taxpayer claims that responding and complying is voluntary. Not so. A summons is a command to appear, testify, and produce documents, and the IRS is authorized to issue one. The district courts will enforce the summons, if necessary. And yes, there can be criminal penalties.

Supporters of this bogus theory say that it’s the IRS’s responsibility to prepare and file a tax return for them if they don’t file. But the tax law really says that if someone doesn’t file their return, the IRS can prepare their return (i.e. make up numbers for the person). It doesn’t say that the IRS must prepare the return. And the tax law doesn’t say that a person is excused from filing a tax return.

Written by me at Walletpop…

Hundreds of thousands of Americans get sucked into Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies each year. From Mary Kay to Amway to Herbalife to PrePaid Legal, the list is seemingly endless. Each offers its own special spin on the products it sells, but the main focus of an MLM is on recruiting new members.

MLMs live and die by the recruitment of new members, who make the bulk of the product purchases from the company. Little of the product is resold to an actual end user, but the MLM company doesn’t care. The sale has been made to the distributor (or associate or representative or member or consultant or whatever term you like).

Yes. It’s true. The Cheater Patriots are now in the NFL record books for “going” 16-0 in the regular season. Of course, I put “going” in quotes, because we all know that their record really should not be even be considered a record. They were caught cheating early in the season, and should at least have that win taken away from them.

Instead, the NFL basically gave the Cheater Patriots a big “oh well” on the whole deal. Sure, they got a fine and lost a draft pick, but they should have had to give up the win against the Jets. I’m not sure why they got away with this. Lord knows that if it was the Green Bay Packers caught videotaping things in direct violation of the rules, we wouldn’t have heard the end of it all season. Nope. And there would have been much bigger sanctions.

The Patriots may be an excellent team, but the world will never know if they could have gotten this record without cheating. Because they did it. They cheated. And this “record” is forever tainted.

Yesterday, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story about a woman who had lost her life’s savings because of an old cashier’s check that JP Morgan Chase wouldn’t honor.

The story goes like this: Willie Floyd is 82 years old. She had a cashier’s check for $19,700 that was in a safe deposit box. The money came from cashing out a savings account at Marine Bank in Waukesha in April 1985. The bank changed from Marine Bank, to Bank One, and now to Chase.

This one is at least a little creative. File a tax return showing no taxable income, and your taxes are zero. That would work if you really have no income. But since most of us have W-2s and 1099s and such, that “zero income” return is actually false… and you really do owe taxes.

Don’t you kind of wonder who is coming up with these arguments? I mean… how can they think it’s okay to just lie and say their income is zero? It makes no sense.

A lawsuit filed in Arizona shows that the music industry wants to control how you listen to the music you purchase. Jeffrey Howell purchased (legally) about 2,000 songs on various CDs. He then transferred those song s to his personal computer, and has been listening to them from there. And now he’s being sued by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

The RIAA’s lawyer, Ira Schwartz, says in legal filings that the MP3 files Howell made from the CDs are “unauthorized copies” of the copyrighted songs.

Now, going after those who download songs illegally or share downloaded songs illegally – that’s one thing. But this is ludicrous. The guy purchased the CDs, and has a right to personally listen to them however he chooses. So long as he’s not “distributing” those songs, how can the RIAA really go after him? This screams insanity.

Like yesterday’s bunk, this false assertion relies upon the idea that taxes are voluntary. Again, the concept that our tax system is based upon voluntary assessment and payment. But that doesn’t mean that taxes are voluntary all together. It means that taxpayers give up their information and tell the IRS how much they’re supposed to pay under the tax law.

We can go straight to the Internal Revenue Code, which imposes a tax on the taxable income of individuals, estates, and trusts as determined by tax tables.

Protesters have known to get cute too, and try to avoid taxes by saying that they just don’t know if income is taxable or not. That one doesn’t fly either.

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