Fresh off the Wesley Snipes case two actors are having their own tax troubles. Joe Kristan found this story about Joe Pesci. Mr. Pesci besides appearing in movies has his own production company with employees. The regulation involved states, “You must make deposits using EFTPS for all depository tax liabilities for the current year if you made more than $200,000 in aggregate deposits for all types of Federal depository taxes in the year two years before the current year or if you were required to make electronic deposits in the previous year.”
Mr. Pesci’s production company didn’t use EFTPS, and the penalties were upheld.
Meanwhile, actor Nicolas Cage will be fighting the IRS in Tax Court. The TaxProf Blog quotes a story in Forbes:
The IRS says movie star Nicolas Cage used a company he owns to wrongly write off $3.3 million in personal expenses, including limos, meals, gifts, travel and his Gulfstream 1159A turbojet. … The feds hit Cage both ways, denying Saturn a deduction for the disputed expenses while taxing Cage individually on the perks as salary and “constructive dividends.”
Cage’s business manager, Samuel J. Levin, says in an e-mail that the expenses were proper as “customary in the entertainment industry” and were partly based on the actor’s “security needs.”
Mr. Cage’s Tax Court case will probably not be heard for many months, with a decision possible in 2009.
