Giving free tax advice to a friend. Can this get me in trouble? Let's assume I am helping a very close friend of mine who owns a small family restaurant. She has 2 people working for her and she treats them as independent contractors. Under current conditions I am quite sure IRS would reclassify them as full time employee's and fine her (sole proprietorship). AFAIK, IRS does not know about this yet, but if they wanted to find out they easily could by expanding the audit. I am giving her tips on what options she has and what would be pros&amp;cons of each option. Also I helped her to talk with IRS over phone to solve the other tax audit. IRS agent over phone wrote down my name while I represented her - I guess this is standard procedure. Can I get into trouble for giving tax advice to a friend (e.g. there is this dreaded Trust Fund recovery Penalty)? Things to consider: I am not getting paid for explaining things or giving a tip to her. I am not licensed and I am not lawyer. Her business does not make enough money to afford real legal consultation.
31 USC 330 enables the Dept. of Treasury to regulate those who are in the practice of representing persons before the Department. This results in Circular 230 which is a part of the Code of Federal Regulations. Part 10.3 specifies various types who are authorized to engage in the practice. The meaning of "practice" is not defined in the federal regs or the US code, so it has its ordinary meaning. To "practice" something is to habitually do something as a profession (not necessarily for money). The situation you describe does not in any reasonable interpretation constitute being a "practice". Moreover, except for talking to an IRS agent on the phone, the actions could not be construed as "representing" (and if I am correct in surmising that this was a simultaneous conversation with 3 people on the line, this wasn't "representing" since representing meaning to "do in someone's place", not "help someone while they do"). This contrasts with the typically stricter rules about "practicing law", which forbid filling out legal forms and so on.
Raise the question with your employer If you believe that you are an employee and not a contractor then there is presumably something you want from your employer. This may be additional wages and entitlements that you would have or will become entitled to for past or future work respectively. Or you may have been injured and want workers' compensation. Or terminated and you want redundancy pay. Whatever it is, work it out and raise the issue with your employer. You might want to consult an accountant or union to help you. They may acknowledge that you were incorrectly classified and give you what you want. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Or they may dispute it. If so, you need to follow the dispute resolution processes at your workplace. These typically involve informal discussions, escalating to mediation and then to a workplace tribunal run by the government. You will almost certainly want to consult a lawyer or union to help you - given that you don't know where to start the learning curve is likely to be too steep. In virtually every jurisdiction if people are employees at law they can't choose not to be. in british-columbia the relevant law appears to be the Employment Standards Act although it's not unheard of in edge cases for a person to be an employee under one law (e.g. workers' compensation) and a contractor under another (e.g. income tax). From the linked site: The overriding question is “whose business is it?” Is the person who is doing the work doing it as a person in business for themselves? If you are working "for" your own business you are probably a contractor. If you are working "for" your employer's business you are probably an employee. For example, if you are an accountant with several dozen clients, maintain your own business premises and charge for your advice based on the amount quoted rather than by the hour, you're a contractor. If instead, you have 2 clients, work from their premises at set hours and get paid by the day or week, you're an employee with 2 jobs. In edge cases these are not cut and dried - Google are Uber driver's employees. In Australia: no. In California: yes. In the UK: yes.
On the first page of https://www.gov.uk/duty-free-goods/overview you find: "You can bring some goods from abroad without having to pay UK tax or ‘duty’ (customs charges), as long as they’re for your own use." And on the next page "... will use them yourself or give them away as a gift". This clearly doesn't cover anything that you bring into the UK to sell it. And a bit further on the site it says "You must tell customs (known as ‘declaring’) on arrival in the UK if you have goods: ... that you plan to sell". Since you are asking here, it is quite obvious that you intend to sell :-) You said "e.g. say this guys comes every month from Russia to France for unrelated business, each time he fills up his luggage with the maximum allowed amount of goods that comply with custom laws". If this guy sells the stuff to you, then the maximum allowed amount of goods to import without paying taxes is zero. Once he is willing to pay taxes, there is no limit. Obviously regularly importing things from Russia or France and selling in the UK at a profit means that he is running a business in the UK, which means he would have to register a business, pay corporation taxes etc. It's all a matter of degree; for small amounts nobody cares (up to some limit you don't need to register a business or pay taxes; I don't know the details).
If I do some business travel for your company then I send you a bill for my working time and my expenses, and I expect it to be paid. If your shareholder does some business travel for your company, they can do the same. If they don't charge you for the working time, good for your company. Just expect the IRS to look at this bill more carefully than usual to make sure this is not in reality a dividend payment. For example, if the business travel was &quot;two weeks in a five star hotel in Hawaii, all expenses paid&quot;, that wouldn't look quite right and cause trouble for both of you. PS: Cost of travelling to a company’s share holder meeting is not a business expense.
This question sounds to me like there is an inferred intent of the person giving the invoice to manipulate their value added tax rate due to the misclassification, and then an unrelated issue related to an overly high charge for the services which are basically independent. Is the classification of the job material in some way to either of those issues in a non-obvious way that you haven't clarified in your question? I will answer on the assumption that it is not, because at first glance, it is hard to see why this would matter with respect to either issue. A CVR listing is sort of half way between a U.S. Secretary of State company listing and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission company listing with more than just bare bones contact information but less than a full fledged public company's disclosure statement. The fact that the company's business type classification is not a precise match for the kind of work that they did for you on this job is not obviously material to either what VAT taxes would be due (which usually depends upon the particular kinds of goods and services involved in the transaction) or the rate that a company can charge for a particular kind of work done. The fact that a company is classified in one category that describes the overall enterprise doesn't mean that every last thing done by the company must precisely fit that description. The mismatch could also conceivably be nothing more than a clerical error made by somebody preparing the CVR listing, in which case, again, the answer is "so what?" Therefore, as far as I can tell from the limited information in the question, this is just an immaterial error with no relevance to any of the likely disputes that you might have in this case. Usually, an immaterial error in a public record or invoice would not be a ground to object the amount that a company charged for the work, nor would it be something that would be appropriate to complain about in any way that would bring you an advantage that I can see in this transaction. This doesn't mean that you don't potentially have grounds to object to the invoice and dispute the higher than expected charges. But, bringing up the issue of the CVR code doesn't appear to add anything to your rights in this dispute. This said, I can certainly imagine circumstance where the wrong CVR code could be a hint that something else really is amiss. For example, suppose that you need a license to do a cleaning job since it involves environmental hazards and waste disposal, but you don't need a license to do management consulting, because who cares if someone is stupid enough to take your bad management advice. In that situation, the company might be misclassified because it doesn't have and perhaps cannot get for some reason, the business license that it needs to do the cleaning job. Charging for services while not having the proper business license might very well be illegal and a ground not to pay, and the error in the CVR filing might actually be an attempt to circumvent this problem. But, that kind of possibility relies upon pure speculation and without more facts there is no good reason to assume that something nefarious is going on here.
There are several federal excise taxes on firearms. The main ones are (dispensing with the fine definitional details and Internal Revenue Code citations): A tax on transfers of firearms of $5 per concealable firearm and $200 per firearm on certain other firearms; a $500 per year firearm's dealers tax which is increased to $1000 if you import more than a certain number of firearms per year; a 10% of sales price excise tax on pistols and revolvers; and an 11% of sales price excise tax on other firearms and on ammunition. Of course, like any other business, firearm's dealers also have to file annual income tax returns on their revenues less their expenses on tax forms that depend upon the form of organization of the business (e.g. C-corporation, S-corporation, partnership/LLC, trust, etc.). The IRS has the right to examine the books and records of people who owe or are believed to owe taxes without going to a court to obtain permission to do so. Treas. Reg. § 1.601.105. Subject to certain exceptions, information obtained by the IRS in a review of a taxpayers records and their return information are confidential. 26 U.S.C. § 6103. There are criminal penalties for (slightly over simplifying) tax offenses including willfully failing to keep records necessary to file tax returns, willfully attempting to evade or defeat taxes, willfully failing to collect and pay taxes where required by law to do so, and willfully making false statements to IRS employees or on returns. 26 U.S.C. § 7201-7212. If the government provides probable cause to a federal judge or magistrate in connection with a possible criminal tax prosecution that there is probable cause to believe that a taxpayer has committed a criminal tax offense, then the government may obtain a search warrant to seize records without the advanced notice available in the usual civil record examination process. For example (not based on any facts I have been told about or read about in this particular case), suppose that a former employee of a firearm's dealer or an ex-spouse of one of the owners of the business, told the IRS that the dealer intentionally lied on their excise tax return by underreporting the number of firearms the dealer sold and that the dealer then kept the sales taxes collected from unreported buyers who completed Form 4473, and told the IRS criminal division investigators where the Form 4473s were kept at the dealer's offices. In that case, it would be routine for the IRS to obtain a federal search warrant to obtain those forms to seize and review in connection with an excise tax fraud investigation. If there was just an income tax audit, bank records and accounting records obtained by subpoena from banks and accountants would usually be sufficient. But this would cease to be the case if the inventory records obtained by subpoena from the dealer's suppliers, for example, and the accounting records, didn't match. If there was evidence of unreported firearm sales income, or of unreported excise taxable sales, the IRS would usually need to compare the the Form 4473s of the business to its income and excise tax returns filed with the IRS. It would be routine to obtain these records with a search warrant rather than a civil office record review with advanced notice if tax fraud was suspected. The Form 4473s due to IRS confidentiality requirements, wouldn't be publicly available to anyone by the IRS and criminal investigators (not even members of Congress or local law enforcement), and would probably only be presented in redacted or summary forms in a criminal tax fraud prosecution at trial. In all likelihood, the IRS doesn't care about the customers who filled out the Form 4473s at all, and isn't even bothering to investigate them (except possibly to spot check for fake social security numbers or names, which appear on the forms, to see if fake information was used to Form 4473s used to substantiate tax records). Instead, the IRS is probably simply tallying them up and noting dates of sale, putting them in a spreadsheet, and seeing if they are different from what was reported to the IRS on the dealer's tax returns. If the dealer, for example, paid the proper excise taxes on 800 guns in 2022, but had 1200 Form 4473s in banker's boxes at its offices, then the people involved in the tax fraud at the dealership are probably going to go to federal prison for a few years. Indeed, they would probably just plead guilty rather than going through a futile trial where documents with their own signatures on them from boxes seized in their shop clearly establish their guilt in that case. Federal firearm excise tax fraud prosecutions aren't terribly common, but they are about as plain vanilla as they come in the world of federal criminal prosecutions. This certainly doesn't portend any threat the Second Amendment rights or any crack down on the firearms industry. In terms of this message this sends, this is really no different that seizing the electronic records of a gas station that filed false gasoline excise tax returns to show how much gasoline was actually sold, and prosecuting the people who engaged in the tax fraud for that. The argument that a Form 4473 isn't a &quot;financial record&quot;, when it provides documentation of all of the information except the price on all of the dealer's firearm sales (Manufacturer, Model, Serial Number, Type of Firearm, Caliber or Gauge, number of firearms sold, and check boxes for tax exemptions), and the fact the some of the federal firearm excise taxes due don't even depend upon the price of the firearm, isn't a very strong one. Even if the search warrant didn't single out Forms 4473s from other kinds of business records, this would probably just be harmless error, because the IRS absolutely has the right to ask for and seize Form 4473s in connection with the tax fraud investigation, just like any other business record of a firm suspected of not paying its taxes. These records aren't protected by any evidentiary privilege in a federal tax fraud prosecution. Also, combined with past sales fliers and catalogues and business records about sales pricing for different products from the dealer in its accounting records, it would be fairly trivial to use this information to recreate a very accurate forensic reconstruction of the gross firearm sales revenues of the dealer and the amount of excise taxes that should have been paid. It would be tedious work, but it would be extremely damning evidence of tax fraud if the estimated sales significantly exceeds the sales reported on the dealer's tax returns. Even if the some of the documents in a particular banker's box aren't within the scope of the search warrant (for example, perhaps someone put Christmas Cards and as well as accounting ledgers and cancelled checks in the same box), the IRS would not be beyond its rights to grab all of the banker's boxes of documents, review them at their leisure in a government office, and then return the contents of the boxes that turned out to be something other than what the IRS requested a search warrant to seize. A good faith belief that the boxes seized has some financial records in them would justify taking them away, reviewing their contents, and returning materials that were beyond the scope of what was sought. The IRS criminal division agents don't have to look through the many, many banker's boxes page by page at the dealer's place of business to screen them at that time at that level of detail. Similarly, the IRS agents are not required to assume that boxes actually contain what the label on the outside of the box says that the box contains. Of course, if the Form 4473s corroborate the tax returns filed by the dealer apart from minor clerical errors or uncertainties about the exact sales prices of sales reported on them due to irregular discounts provided by a dealer who sometimes haggled over the prices of used firearms, the dealer would be vindicated and the informant who triggered the investigation and prosecution (if there is evidence that this informant willfully lied to IRS investigators) might even be prosecuted for making an intentionally false report to a law enforcement officer. The dealer wouldn't be entitled to reimbursement for criminal defense expenses or harm to the dealer's reputation, but it would still be a huge PR coup and the criminal charges would go away, probably long before a trial was even held. Montana Attorney General Austin Knudsen absolutely knows all of the facts in the post above. His claimed fear of a crackdown on gun users is something he is doing to willfully mislead the people of Montana for political gain. He may also be throwing stones at federal prosecutions because he was irritated that the IRS and Justice Department didn't keep him in the loop on this tax investigation in his state which he sees as his turf, even though it was purely a matter of federal tax law violations which his office didn't have jurisdiction over. Indeed, the IRS may have kept him in the dark and out of the loop from this investigation, in part, in order to protect taxpayer and gun owner privacy by not sharing confidential IRS investigation information with state law enforcement officers, something that it is not allowed to do.
You understand the business of landlording before you get started. You don't landlord for the purpose of evicting someone. You landlord for the purpose of exchanging keys for a duration for money, specifically by creating a leasehold estate that you sell to your tenant. Your tenant has the leasehold, you don't have the money, in part because it sounds like you didn't collect any before you handed over the keys or confirm your tenants' ability and history of paying. You now want to nullify the leasehold. In general this is the eviction you ask about. You are now reliant on a court in your jurisdiction to enforce the contract law with respect to the lease language and prevailing local ordinances. I cannot speak specifically to NY courts but they have a reputation as tenant friendly so you need to demonstrate your professional approach and locally required paperwork such as a certificate of occupancy, business license, etc. All lined up to make it easy for a judge to agree with you. You have an uphill battle. Turning off utilities (as mentioned in another post of yours) is not a professional move and will bias many judges against you. No certificate of occupancy may mean your original lease contract created a leasehold contrary to a public policy of NY which could put a judge in a bind if they found your case compelling. If a competent lawyer would cost $15k then it sounds like it might be cheapest to offer the tenant a couple thousand for the keys and a signed release to walk away&ndash;spend a couple hundred on the lawyer for this. Do not give them the money until they are out and give you the keys. This is called cash for keys.
Not legal advice - you should consult an attorney who knows your local jurisdiction. That's a general statement, but especially true here because the GDPR does not include personal liability for directors (or others) in the event of a data breach, but domestic laws may indeed do just that. The UK is one example where certain circumstances can lead to criminal liability for directors of a firm in the event of a breach. That said, your company should care. The fines for knowingly allowing a breach or not reporting it properly in a timely manner have been made more significant than the prior Directive. There are things you could do to potentially mitigate consequences in the event of a breach and a fine being levied on the company, such as aligning with best practices and getting certifications. In sum, the actual punishments for noncompliance will vary by jurisdiction, but any business that handles data in the EU should undoubtedly be ensuring it is aware of what, if any, obligations it has and taking steps to comply before May's deadline.