On Jan 14, 8:16*am, "Tom Littleton" wrote:
From the news:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28642237

Sorry, but I am not alright with this. A 'mistake'?? For a three year
running period? *I don't know about anyone else around here, but I will
admit that on a couple of returns, I overlooked taxable income mistakenly..
In both cases, the IRS thoughtfully contacted me, and promptly, to point out
the error. I paid up.....immediately. Something here seems, at first glance,
to reek of the sense of entitlement of Wall Street types that got the nation
into a host of trouble, and runs counter to the ideals espoused by the
President-elect. Obama would be well served to reconsider this nomination,
IMO.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *Tom

Your link didn't open, but I assume the article is similar to this
one?
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123187503629378119.html

My thoughts:
First of all, filing US taxes as an international worker is not a
simple thing. For folks at the lower end of the scale, it might be
pretty straightforward, but if your income is high enough to trigger
the 'stacking rule' and overrides certain exeptions and exclusons, you
are in a realm whrere there are few tax professionals who know the ins
and outs, and making a mistake is not unreasonable. And mistakes will
tend to be large ones...errors in assumptions about what is claimable
or what is not, rather than nickle-and-dime errors that only effect a
line item.

Secondly, he probably had a tax advisor do his taxes anyway. How many
of US go line-by-line through our tax advisors' work and check their
results? If we could do that, we'd do our own taxes.

My feeling is that, unless it could be shown that he either acted
maliciously by deliberately misfiling his taxes or instructing his tax
accountant to misfile, or else if he chose to ignore the advice of his
tax advisor who told him certain back taxes were due, then he fell
afoul of the same set of complex tax laws that many Americans struggle
with.

--riverman