{"id":489,"date":"2003-12-12T08:38:58","date_gmt":"2003-12-12T16:38:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/12\/12\/irs-attacks-comic-book-store\/"},"modified":"2003-12-12T08:38:58","modified_gmt":"2003-12-12T16:38:58","slug":"irs-attacks-comic-book-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=489","title":{"rendered":"IRS attacks comic book store"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some days being a libertarian would almost make sense. From Bloggity Blog-Blog-Blog<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The owner of my local comic shop, Paige Gifford, was approached by the IRS in March for a “compliance audit”. The brand-spankin new agent they had put on her case didn’t believe she could make a living selling comics. Once she was able to prove that she was in compliance, and not selling something on the side, and that yes, she did make a living selling comic books, the agent went after her inventory. He said that he knew how much baseball cards are worth, and so old comics must be worth a lot of money. He estimated how much her backstock was worth (based on his own bizarre calculation). He then told her that she hadn’t paid taxes on her inventory, and that she owed $14,000 in taxes. She’s a small business owner. $14,000 is a lot of money.
\nSo she got some help. At times the thing seemed almost resolved. But the IRS is determined to run her out of business. Within the last week she was told that she cannot have any backstock of comics. She has to destroy her backstock – shred or burn every comic book – by December 31st in order to get out of the debt. And she needs a receipt to prove that she destroyed the comics. Otherwise, she owes the IRS $14,000, and will owe the IRS an inventory tax every year from here on out. Even though her lawyer and accountant are convinced that she’s completely in compliance with every pertainable law.<\/div>\n

A more detailed account, written by the comic book store owner<\/a>, is also on Laura’s blog.<\/p>\n

This is a frightening case. I’ve been around comic book shops enough to know that virtually no comic book shop is taxed this way by the IRS – and if they were, virtually no comic book store would still exist. There may be more information which makes the IRS’ position look reasonable, but as far as I can tell, this is genuinely a case of the IRS driving a small businesswoman into bankruptcy for no reason.<\/p>\n

Dirk Deppey<\/a> has more information. He also requests that Washington residents drop a quick, polite note to their senators asking that they intervene – check out his post for more info..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days being a libertarian would almost make sense. From Bloggity Blog-Blog-Blog: The owner of my local comic shop, Paige Gifford, was approached by the IRS in March for a “compliance audit”. The brand-spankin new agent they had put on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-site-and-admin-stuff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/489\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}