| PERFECTLY LEGAL The Covert Campaign to Rig our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich—and Cheat Everybody Else David Cay Johnston New York: Penguin Group, 2003 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
|||
| ISBN 1-59184-019-8 | 338p. | HC | $25.95 | |
| Page 50: | First paragraph on the page (consisting of one 20-word sentence) |
| This paragraph should have been placed just above the table on the previous page. |
| Page 51: | Consider a company in which the deferral accounts of its executives... totals $1.5 billion... |
| Number: S/B "accounts...total". |
| Page 57: | Their mangers charge fat fees... |
| Typo: S/B "managers". |
| Page 58: | Much of the money invested in these hedge funds comes not from rich individuals, but from some of the biggest charitable endowments, whose invetstment income is usually free of tax. |
| Typo: S/B "investment". |
| Page 65: | Helms quote: "the Senator from Ohio and I sometimes differ on legislation, but I think that he and I are equally revulsed by activities such as this." |
| Vocabulary: S/B either "repulsed" or "revolted". |
| Page 77: | "...how deeply the Senate Finance hearings scared people with its bogus tales." |
| Number: S/B "their". |
| Page 83: | "The father became a successful Seattle lawyer. The couple had money to give their son to start his business, after he dropped out of Harvard, because the taxpayers also paid a salary to Mrs. Gates when she taught public school. So not only did the country's largest fortune begin with a gift that was tax-free, but also the gift money was there because of the taxpayers." |
| I can't see how the second half of this claim holds up. I call it arguable at best. |
| Page 86: | "...the other person who immediately spotted the loophole was none other than Jonathan Blattmachr." |
| Who was the first person to spot it? The author? |
| Page 103: | "But the policy of making sure that at least every person with an adjusted gross income of $200,000 paid some tax still failed." |
| S/B "$200,000 or more". |
| Page 123: | "In only two years since the 1981 tax cuts has the federal government kept spending in line with its revenues other than Social Security, and in one of those two years the surplus was a only by a hair's breadth." |
| Extra words: S/B "only a hair's breadth". |
| Page 130: | "What Clinton did in stepping up audits of the working poor was the equivalent of a mayor pulling detectives off the homicide squad to write parking tickets." |
| Bad analogy. With rare exceptions (perhaps including the BCCI case1), high-roller tax cheats are not killers. |
| Page 137: | "Her suggestion that all tax preparers be regulated—as accountants, lawyers, and those tax preparers known as enrolled agents are—were ignored despite the potential to reduce fraud of all kinds." |
| Number: S/B "suggestion ... was". |
| Page 160: | "In the twenty-first century, some [computers] still bear the nameplate of Sperry Univac, communicating in a computer language so ancient that, but for the IRS, it would be deader than Latin." |
| What language? COBOL? COBOL lives! (As does Latin.). |
| Page 167: | "One is the subchapter S corporation, which is favored by many doctors, lawyers and other professionals because it does not pay taxes directly, but instead passes tax liabilities to their owners." |
| Number: S/B "its". |
| Page 189: | "Several hundred of these companies had as their official headquarters Caribbean islands like St. Nevis-Kitts, the Cayman Islands and Bermuda." |
| Geography: S/B "St. Kitts-Nevis". |
| Page 203: | "The IRS has the authority to summons financial records from taxpayers..." |
| S/B "summon" or "subpoena" or "obtain by summons". |
| Page 254: | "ChevronTexaco said the research paper was nothing more than a rehash of IRS issues it had settled long ago and were without merit." |
| This one could be an error of number. But I'm going to call it a missing-word case and say S/B "and which were without merit". A comment on the substance: If the "issues" were without merit, why would ChevronTexaco have settled? |
| Page 265: | "The trick involved briefly involving one spouse in the trust because gifts of money between husband and wife are never taxable." |
| I think this S/B "one's spouse". An error in transcribing from dictation? |
| Page 270: | "Instead he kept their shares and watched their value plummet when the stock market bubble burst." |
| It's clear from context this S/B "the shares". |
| Page 273: | "But that money is not safe anymore, either." |
| S/B "any more". |
| Page 279: | "As part of Bittner's plans, Rochester became the first city in the country with open competition for local telephone service. Instead of being a regulated monopoly, any telephone company was free to offer local telephone service." |
| Dangling participle: S/B "it was one where any telephone company". |
| Page 288: | "That is, a reasonably solid investment in a company that relied heavily on the predictable profits from Rochester Tel and 37 other local telephone companies |
| Number: S/B "investment ... was". |
| Page 299: | "For a spell there was even a rule requiring disclosure of these tax favors." |
| Semantics: S/B "requiring" or "forbidding"? |
| Page 306: | "Congress needs to stop finding ways to let people avoid reporting income and to shift to a system that requires income recognition sooner, not later, and requires that taxes be paid immediatley." |
| Transposed letters: S/B "immediately". |
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.