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Take it from someone who has a hoard of legal accordion files stashed away in a hope chest: It’s a good idea to keep your tax records. However, if you’re going through a phase of trying to get rid of everything, the IRS is (sort of) clear on how many years to keep the paper trail. How Long To Keep Your Tax Records Let’s go in descending order: Forever: If you never filed a return, or if you filed a fraudulent return (neither of which is recommended) 7 years: If you file a claim for a loss from worthless securities...

During my junior year in college, 1960–1961, I took the Constitutional Law course given by Dean Leonard W. Levy, one of the country's foremost con law scholars. In addition to his immense store of knowledge, he acknowledged the wisdom of common sense, noting that the response to Supreme Court decisions may depend on whose ox is gored. And he advised his students, in writing papers, "Strike while the iron is hot." This New York Times headline, the lead story for November 23, has gotten my iron hot — and dander up. The print edition headline for the story:"JUSTICES DECIDE /...

Former President Trump on Wednesday ripped the Supreme Court after it rejected his emergency appeal seeking to shield his tax returns from House Democrats. The court’s order on Tuesday caps a multiyear legal battle, paving the way for the House Ways and Means Committee to receive the former president’s tax returns. “Why would anybody be surprised that the Supreme Court has ruled against me, they always do!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is unprecedented to be handing over Tax Returns, & it creates terrible precedent for future Presidents. Has Joe Biden paid taxes on all of the money he...

A bogus motion claiming to be from the U.S. Treasury appeared in the court docket for the Justice Department’s investigation of records seized from Mar-a-Lago. The motion was riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. The bogus document claimed the Treasury had sensitive documents related to the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Florida home and told CNN to keep “leaked tax records.” The bogus document claimed the Treasury had sensitive documents related to the FBI’s raid on Trump’s Florida home and told CNN to keep “leaked tax records.”“The U.S. Department of Treasury through the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Marshals...

Prosecutors investigating Hunter Biden subpoenaed documents from a paternity lawsuit that included tax records for the president's son, according to documents and an attorney involved in the matter. "They wanted every record relating to Hunter Biden we had," Clint Lancaster told CBS News. Lancaster represented Lunden Roberts, a woman who filed suit against Hunter Biden in 2019 alleging he was the father of her child. A December 2020 subpoena from the U.S. Attorney's office in Delaware, obtained by CBS News, requested all documents "regarding [Hunter] Biden's income, assets, debts, obligations, and financial transactions… and all personal and business expenditures." The...

Former President Donald Trump filed a $100 million lawsuit against The New York Times and his niece Mary Trump on Tuesday, alleging his confidential tax documents were improperly shared.The lawsuit, which was filed in the New York Supreme Court, alleged that New York Times reporters Susanne Craig, David Barstow and Russell Buettner pressured Mary Trump to share the former president’s tax documents for an article they were working on in 2018, the Associated Press reported.“The brazenness of the defendants’ actions cannot be understated,” the lawsuit said. “A group of journalists with The New York Times, in the middle of an...

A federal judge on Thursday dismissed President Trump's latest bid to block a subpoena for his taxes from Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero rejected Trump's arguments that the subpoena, from a state grand jury looking into payments made to adult actress Stormy Daniels before Trump 2016 presidential win, was issued in bad faith and is too broad. "We will appeal," the president's personal lawyer Jay Sekulow said. Vance is seeking eight years of Trump's personal and business tax returns as well as other financial documents as part of an investigation into the president's business...

The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a prosecutor’s demand for President Donald Trump’s tax returns as part of a criminal investigation that includes hush-money payments to women who claim they had affairs with Trump. The court ruled 7-2 in a case in which it heard arguments by telephone in May because of the coronavirus pandemic. The records are held by Trump’s longtime accounting firm, Mazars USA, which has said it would comply with a court order. It probably will be at least several weeks before the court issues a formal judgment that would trigger the turnover of the records. The...

Pay-to-Play: Republicans have long suspected that foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation made during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as President Obama’s secretary of state and in her run-up to the 2016 election were likely tied to influence-peddling on the part of the former first couple, and now newly released tax records validate their suspicions. The documents show a dramatic drop-off in donations to the Clinton Foundation after Hillary’s November 2016 loss to POTUS Donald Trump, a race most political analysts had predicted she would win in a landslide. The document release comes amid an ongoing probe by the Justice Department pertaining...

Just months after being slimed by President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, Mitt Romney supporter and businessman Frank VanderSloot was informed that he was going to be audited not only by the Internal Revenue Service, but by the Labor Department as well. VanderSloot’s saga was told by columnist Kimberley Strassel in the Wall Street Journal last July. In April 2012, VanderSloot, who served as the national co-chair of Mitt Romney’s presidential finance committee, was one of eight Romney backers to be defamed as ”wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records” in a post on the Obama campaign’s website. The post, entitled “Behind the...

The Justice Department refused to act after being presented with evidence that a government official had "willfully" accessed private tax documents, it was reported Tuesday. The evidence against the person was laid out in a letter from J. Russell George, the Internal Revenue Service inspector general. He told top Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley he did not know why Justice had not acted, The Washington Times reports. "We presented evidence of a willful unauthorized access to the Department of Justice, but the case was declined for prosecution," George wrote in a letter to Grassley. George said there was evidence of three...

A Middle Tennessee company is at the center of a mystery that could turn the political race upside down. The Secret Service wants to know if a group hacked into Price Waterhouse Cooper's computer system in Franklin and got Mitt Romney's tax records. "Right through here and it was just lying on the floor there," Peter Burr recalled.

FRANKLIN, Tenn. (AP) -- The Secret Service said Wednesday it is investigating the reported theft of copies of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's federal tax records during a break-in at an accounting office in Franklin. Someone claiming responsibility demanded $1 million not to make them public.

COMPLETE TITLE BREAKING: Palin Urges Romney to Release Tax Returns, Provide Proof of 100,000 Jobs Created at Bain Capital ### Former Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin has called for Gov. Mitt Romney to release his tax returns, as well as the data that could substantiate his claim of having created 100,000 jobs as CEO of Bain Capital. Romney has resisted releasing his tax returns, and his campaign has thus far refused to provide the hard proof to back up his claims about Bain. “Governor Romney has claimed to have created 100,000 jobs at Bain, and people are wanting to know:...

If you are like most Americans, you won't start thinking about working on your income tax return until long after ringing in the New Year. However, if you want to avoid the stress of digging through an accumulation of bills and invoices to provide proof of income and/or expenses, the time to begin is now.

PALO ALTO — State Controller Steve Westly released a decade of his tax returns Monday, showing the former EBay executive received nearly a quarter of a billion dollars in income during the 10 years, mostly from selling stock in the online auction house. Westly's release of tax returns is designed in part to pressure Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Treasurer Phil Angelides to do the same. Westly is facing Angelides in the June 2006 Democratic primary for governor, and Schwarzenegger, a Republican, announced last week that he would seek reelection. Anyone who runs for governor needs to be open and...