Domestic Taxes

The wife of Massachusetts lawmaker Rep. John Tierney (D) will plead guilty to charges that she helped her brother conceal what authorities say was a multi-million dollar illegal offshore gambling business.

Federal prosecutors said Tierney's 59-year-old wife Patrice Tierney is expected to plead guilty Monday in U.S. District Court in Boston to four counts of aiding and abetting the filing of false tax returns, according to a report from The Associated Press late Tuesday. 

Robert Eremian, Tierney's fugitive brother, and another sibling face charges including racketeering, money laundering and operating an illegal gambling business.

The seven-term lawmaker says his wife believed her brother's money came from selling or licensing software to legal Internet gambling businesses.

Tierney says his wife accepts full responsibility for being "willfully blind" to what her brother was doing.

Senate Finance ranking member Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa) and six other committee members said Tuesday that an inspector general will investigate whether Obama administration officials illegally accessed and disclosed confidential taxpayer information. 

The lawmakers sent a letter to J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, after media reports quoted a senior White House official describing the tax structure of Koch Industries. George said in a letter to Grassley on Sept. 28 that "I have ordered the commencement of a review into the matters alleged."

"Taxpayer confidentiality laws are strict, in part to prevent the use of tax information for political gain," Grassley said Tuesday in a release. "The official appeared to indicate knowledge of Koch Industries’ tax structure beyond what is publicly available."

Grassley, along with Sens. Jon Kyl, (Ariz.) Jim Bunning, (Ky.) Pat Roberts, (Kansas) Mike Enzi, (Wyo.) John Cornyn (Texas) and John Ensign, (Wyo.) have asked for an examination into whether administration officials "inappropriately examined and disclosed confidential taxpayer information and if so, whether they violated the taxpayer confidentiality law, known as section 6103," which protects the privacy of federal tax returns and return information.

The nation's wealthier individuals should pay higher taxes while those who make less should get another tax cut. 

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett said Tuesday that he probably pays a lower tax rate "than the cleaning lady," while being critical of the President George W. Bush-era tax cuts, at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in Washington.

Buffett has regularly said that the nation's tax code "has gotten distorted to a huge extent," by levying higher taxes on middle-income taxpayers.

Today he commented that he pays the lowest rate in his Omaha office and has called for higher taxes on those earning higher salaries, including himself.

House Small Business Committee ranking member Sam Graves (R-Mo.) on Tuesday sent a follow-up letter to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman asking how he plans to implement the new healthcare law's 1099 reporting rule, which requires businesses and organizations to report all purchases above $600 to the IRS.  

Former Reagan economist Martin Feldstein on Tuesday said President Obama should extend all the Bush-era tax cuts to show he is not (as some have suggested) anti-business or opposed to helping wealthier taxpayers.

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Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean adds that the economy created jobs after Clinton raised taxes. 

Investment strategist and conservative columnist Donald Luskin on Monday warned that if Congress fails to extend all of the Bush-era tax cuts the economy will slide back into a recession. 

He reasons that the expiration of the tax cuts will create an average tax increase on income of 3.3 percent, which will directly affect consumption.

Democratic leaders vowed that extending middle-class tax cuts would be their top priority, but that promise barely scratches the surface.

The nonprofit organization Liberty Central on Friday kicked off its first-ever national ad campaign to prevent tax increases proposed by President Obama. 

The ad, which will run on conservative talk radio websites, seeks to garner 100,000 online signatures to petition against the coming tax hikes that will result if Congress fails to extend all of the tax cuts enacted by President George W. Bush. 

"Raising taxes in a recession is just bad policy," the add states.

Organizations representing a wide array of constituencies have called on Congress to ban tax patents before the end of the year, warning that a failure to do so will inhibit tax preparers from using strategies that could save their clients money.