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To: TigersEye
The AP and other reporters don't have an idea. Governor Palin's perdiem payments might be subject to taxes ABOVE her expenses while on travel, but that doesn't mean every penny she got is going to be taxed.

Concerning receipts, she has her State of Alaska Credit Card ~ (She's the Governor so you know she has one) ~ and that generates a stream of "state records" which IRS is bound to respect.

Along the way to this conclusion I recall a discussion regarding potential taxability of USPS per diem (where your expenses might be less than what you got paid) and it was determined that IRS would accept agency records ~ and that would consist of a copy of your own travel voucher. At the time we'd just started working with a travel system that electronically tracked your plane tickets, etc. so that you never really got receipts for them, and they were moving to electronic tracking for hotel bills, etc. ~ so you'd get no receipts there either.

The consequence was that the government (manifest in its disguise as USPS) was generating it's own record stream that would be available to IRS if questions arose.

So why would we even keep a copy of our own vouchers? Self defense would be the only reason. Frankly, I never expect to see an IRS agent so screw the old records.

106 posted on 02/19/2009 9:58:19 AM PST by muawiyah
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To: muawiyah
I got the feeling from the story that neither the state of Alaska nor the IRS had much of an idea whether Palin (or any other AK legislator) owed taxes on excess perdiem payments either. Apparently it took an investigative board, from AKs side, to figure out the code. I still get the feeling they weren't exactly sure and just decided to err on the safe side. Everyone fears the IRS! lol

I'm too old and the businesses I've had were too low-money and low-tech to think about having it recorded automatically and electronically. I just saved every scrap of paper I had so nothing could come back on me.

But the media was never too concerned about getting the minor details of this story right in the first place were they?

108 posted on 02/19/2009 1:26:57 PM PST by TigersEye (This is the age of the death of reason.)
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