Category: Benefits

How about the “Pocket Lawyer Talking Doll“? (Disclaimer: No financial incentives here at all. No guarantees about this product or the company selling this product.)

A previous post day before yesterday featured the AMT tax trap. The Wall Street Journal today has this article: “Minimum Tax Ensnares More People Each Year.” What’s the most serious problem encountered by taxpayers, asks the article? According to the article and a report by a senior Internal Revenue Service official, “that dubious honor now belongs to the alternative minimum tax, which is hitting growing numbers of Americans.” The article quotes Nina E. Olson, IRS National Taxpayer Advocate of the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an IRS unit designed to help taxpayers cut through bureaucratic red tape and resolve problems that haven’t been fixed through normal IRS channels, as saying that the AMT problem is a “train wreck.”

The article notes that “[a]bout 3.3 million taxpayers will owe additional taxes next year because of the AMT,”up 27% from this year and that support for overhauling the tax is widespread.

The Tax Policy Center also has this article: “The AMT Out of Control.”

Today’s Wall Street Journal is reporting that a musical revival in Washington at a Capitol Hill party roasted tax shelters. According to the article, a woman sang “God Rest You Merry Tax Shelters” to the tune of “God Rest You Merry Gentlemen.” “O hidings of shelter and joy. . .” she sang.

In addition, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Pam Olson, Treasury’s assistant secretary for tax policy, has quipped: “This just in: Citing the growing cost of running the federal government and the need to cut costs in order to reduce the budget deficit, President Bush announced today that he was laying off all 535 members of Congress and transferring lawmaking operations to a legislative support center in Bangalore, India.”

Regarding the lawsuit against the NYSE by Calpers (the nation’s largest public pension fund, with assets of more than $157 billion), The Street.com reports: “Calpers Sues the NYSE.” Also, you can access the complaint filed here and the Calpers press release here.

The New York Stock Exchange this week sent notices to listed companies advising them of a list of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s) regarding the shareholder approval requirements for equity compensation plans. Mike O’Sullivan at CorpLawBlog (here) and Broc Romanek have both commented on the FAQs.

The Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute has a helpful link to U.S. Supreme Court “Recent Decisions on Pensions and ERISA”. Listed are many of the U.S. Supreme Court cases benefits attorneys refer to often such as Boggs v. Boggs, Harris Trust, Egelhoff v. Egelhoff, and Great-West. Cases link directly to Federal Code sections and other cited case law.

I have added this link to the “Pertinent Laws” section over on the right.

The IRS has issued final regulations regarding Disclosure of Relative Values of Optional Forms of Benefit. The regulations “consolidate the content requirements applicable to explanations of qualified joint and survivor annuities and qualified preretirement survivor annuities payable under certain retirement plans, and specify requirements for disclosing the relative value of optional forms of benefit that are payable from certain retirement plans in lieu of a qualified joint and survivor annuity.” The regulations provide that they are applicable “to QJSA explanations with respect to distributions with annuity starting dates on or after October 1, 2004, and to QPSA explanations provided on or after July 1, 2004.” More on this later . . .

“Tax cuts may push some families into AMT trap“: USA Today.com reports. The article states:

The Bush administration’s tax cuts, the main reason many families will get a larger refund, will also force more taxpayers to pay the alternative minimum tax. . . The Bush tax cut exacerbated the problem because it reduced ordinary income tax rates but left AMT rates unchanged, says John Battaglia, a director with Deloitte, the U.S. arm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, a financial services firm. While the Bush administration increased the AMT exemption amount for certain taxpayers, the AMT will still ensnare many upper-middle-income taxpayers who take advantage of widely used deductions.

Kerry Kerstetter offers his thoughts on the tax at the Tax Guru-Ker$tetter Letter:

Actually, it would be good if more people saw what an insane tax this is and demanded that our rulers eliminate it. It seems that until the number of victims reaches a certain critical mass, it will just be perceived as a tax on the evil rich, who deserve no tax breaks according to “popular wisdom” (an oxymoron if there ever was one).

There is something to be said for this type of compensation program–the mega Christmas bonus! CNN.com reports: “Shoe plant workers get up to $20,000 bonuses.” No discrimination testing to worry about, no vesting issues, no reporting and disclosure requirements, etc. Just one thing though–it might be hard to top this next year. Thanks to the Business Pundit for recommending the link.

There is a good article in the Philadephia Inquirer today: “Bloggers bang out reactions to capture.” “Worldwide chatter about Saddam Hussein erupted in the blogosphere within minutes of his capture and was still at fever pitch yesterday.” One blogger said it best, “”Think of every moment when some poor soul believed he was about to die, every moment spent in hellish prisons, every person tortured beyond imagining, every child dumped in a mass grave, every person of faith treated as an enemy of the state . . .To watch the perpetrator of this extraordinary evil brought low … is a privilege … a moment when some kind of cosmic justice breaks through the clouds. … It was a day of joy. Nothing remains to be said. Joy.”