MauledAgain

Almost all Thanksgiving messages that I read focus on gratitude for people and things that bring or have brought happiness into our lives. Certainly I have done that in my long string of Thanksgiving posts on this blog. But is it premature to thank those who intend to do things in the future that will bring happiness or at least dampen the sorrow, misery, grief, and anxiety that is now and very well may be in the future?

Last year I wrote, “This year Thanksgiving is, for me, strange and conflicted. Yes, I am thankful for many things, as I will describe in a subsequent paragraph. But I also am disappointed that there are things for which I could be thankful but am not because they did not happen, and things that did happen for which I am not thankful. But I will leave those aside because there are people who will be thankful I am leaving those things aside.” Sadly, the list of things that did happen that don’t inspire me to give thanks has grown.

As I have noted in each of the past twelve years, “I have presented litanies, bursts of Latin, descriptions of events and experiences for which I have been thankful, names of people and groups for whom I have appreciation, and situations for which I have offered gratitude. Together, these separate lists become a long catalog, and as I have done in previous years, I will do a lawyerly thing and incorporate them by reference. Why? Because I continue to be thankful for past blessings, and because some of those appreciated things continue even to this day.” When I re-read those lists, I realized that the people, events, and things for which I am appreciative are far from obsolete.

So once again on this one day I will look back at the past twelve months, and remember the people, events, and things for whom and for which I give thanks and have given thanks throughout the year. If some of these seem repetitive, they are, for there are gifts in life that keep on giving:

• I am thankful for a wonderful son, daughter, daughter-in-law, grandson, and granddaughter.
  
• I am thankful for my siblings, nephews, nieces, grandnephews, grandnieces, cousins of various degrees, and their families.
  
• I am thankful for my friends who listen to my stories, and tell me even better stories.
  
• I am thankful that I was able to transcribe into my Serino, Italy, genealogy the data that I brought back in 2024 from Italy, a task that took almost a year but that enlarged that town’s genealogy substantially (and added some ancestors to my mother’s maternal ancestry).
  
• I am thankful that I was put in contact with a researcher in Italy who has been able to provide additional information that I am currently transcribing.
  
• I am thankful for all the people who continue to help update the multiple family trees I develop, maintain, update, and publish.
  
• I am thankful for the additional cousins I have met through FTDNA, ancestry, 23andme, and myheritage who I did not know existed, and for the opportunity to get in touch with cousins who I knew existed but with whom I had no contact until they showed up on one or more of those genetic genealogy sites.
  
• I am thankful that my congregation’s choir has been able to continue singing.
  
• I am thankful that we continue to gather in the sanctuary for worship, and, yes, that I continue to ring the narthex bell.
  
• I am thankful for all the people in the world who continue to fight ignorance, crime, terror, evil, and corruption, and who plan to continue doing so.
  
• I am thankful that awareness of what needs to be done to fight ignorance and corruption has not diminished.
  
• I am thankful for the medical professionals who have provided me with excellent care, including the cardiologists who alerted me quickly to the need for me to pay attention to what otherwise could have been a serious problem and to have the necessary procedure, and whose attention and advice has me doing thigs that will hopefully prevent a recurrence in the future.
  
• I am thankful for the people who gave me rides when I was unable to drive.
  
• I am thankful that the Pope, while a student at Villanova University, was the one whose summer jobs included caring for the maintenance of the cemetery in which my paternal grandparents, my father’s paternal grandparents, my father’s brother and sister who died as infants, and my father’s uncle who died in his teens are buried.
  
• I am thankful for people being willing to read the things I write.

Eighteen years ago, in Giving Thanks, Again, I shared my Thanksgiving advice. I liked it so much that I repeated it again, in 2009 in Gratias Vectigalibus, yet again in 2013 in “Don’t Forget to Say Thank-You”, still again in 2014 in Giving Thanks: “No, Thank YOU!” , even yet again in 2015 in Thanks Again!, even still again in 2016 in Thankfully Repetitive, yet once more in 2017 in Never-Ending Thanks, yet even once more in 2018 in Particularly Thankful This Time Around, again in 2019 in Quest'anno è il Ringraziamento, once more in 2020 in Different, But Thanksgiving Nonetheless, again in 2021 in Still Different, But Thanksgiving Nonetheless, again in 2022 in One Day of Thanksgiving, A Year of Thanks, once again in 2023 in A Different Thanksgiving, and yet again last year in On Thanksgiving, There Always Are Reasons to Be Thankful. For me, it does not lose its impact:

Have a Happy Thanksgiving. Set aside the hustle and bustle of life. Meet up with people who matter to you. Share your stories. Enjoy a good meal. Tell jokes. Sing. Laugh. Watch a parade or a football game, or both, or many. Pitch in. Carve the turkey. Wash some dishes. Help a little kid cut a piece of pie. Go outside and take a deep breath. Stare at the sky for a minute. Listen for the birds. Count the stars. Then go back inside and have seconds or thirds. Record the day in memory, so that you can retrieve it in several months when you need some strength.

I am thankful to have the opportunity to share those words yet again. And I am thankful that it is possible for even more of us to do all of those things, and for others of us to most of those things.

Recently, reader Morris sent me a link to a story about chocolate being grown in a laboratory in Switzerland. The article is worth reading if you like chocolate, wonder about the impact of increasing world population and ecological pressure on cocoa bean output, and worry about the health impact of artificially generated food. Nothing in the article mentions taxes or candy, but reader Morris remembered that I have often written about chocolate, candy, and taxes. From that memory he constructed his question that, with a bit of tweaking, is the caption of today’s commentary.

This isn’t the first time that variations in chocolate have been the subject of my musings. In Should the Tax Law Provide a Fix for This Looming Catastrophe?, I asked whether the tax law should provide incentives to offset increases in the price of cocoa in order to dissuade the manufacture of something called mockolate, a chocolate substitute filled with trans fats, artificial sweeteners, milk substitutes, and hydrogenated vegetable fats. Of course, I replied, “Of course not.”

To answer the question posed by reader Morris, I looked again at 61 Pa. Code section 60.7, which holds the definitions of terms relevant to the food and beverages component of the sales tax. It provides:

§ 60.7. Sale and preparation of food and beverages.

(a) Definitions. The following words and terms, when used in this section, have the following meanings, unless the context clearly indicates otherwise:

Candy and gum—The term candy refers to all types of preparations commonly referred to as candy, including hard candy, caramel, chocolate candy, licorice, fudge, cotton candy, caramel coated popcorn, chocolate coated granola bars and similar items. The term gum refers to preparations commonly referred to as gum, including chewing gum, bubble gum and similar items.

So the answer is, chocolate standing alone is not candy, but can be used as a component of candy. Chocolate is used in other food items, such as cakes, donuts, cookies, ice cream, brownies, muffins, scones, fondue, pies, chocolate-covered nuts, chocolate-covered strawberries, and other sorts of food items limited only by the creativity of chefs and amateur cooks. The definition in section 60.7 does not address the source of the chocolate. The question is whether laboratory-grown chocolate is chocolate or something else that resembles chocolate. From what I gather reading the article, the laboratory uses different methods to produce cocoa, which appears to have the same chemical composition as cocoa extracted from the bean. I say “appears” because the company working on producing this laboratory-grown chocolate has not, to the best of my knowledge, released data showing the chemical composition of its product. It may need to do that in the future. If it’s not chocolate but something similar, then perhaps section 60.7 will need an amendment that defines chocolate to include the new substance. If it is indeed chemically chocolate, then it’s not candy but sometimes a component of candy.

Isn’t it fun what tax professionals need to learn in order to work their craft? When I was a first-year law student, my property law course began with the professor asking, “What is property?” Someday perhaps a tax law professor will ask students, “What is chocolate?”

A new wrinkle has pooped up in the world of tax return preparers who run afoul of the tax law. Readers of MauledAgain know that I have written about tax return preparers many times, including posts such as Tax Fraud Is Not Sacred, More Tax Return Preparation Gone Bad, Another Tax Return Preparation Enterprise Gone Bad, Are They Turning Up the Heat on Tax Return Preparers?, Surely There Is More to This Tax Fraud Indictment, Need a Tax Return Preparer? Don’t Use a Current IRS Employee, Is This How Tax Return Preparation Fraud Can Proliferate?, When Tax Return Preparers Go Bad, Their Customers Can Pay the Price, Tax Return Preparer Fails to Evade the IRS, Fraudulent Tax Return Preparation for Clients and the Preparer, Prison for Tax Return Preparer Who Does Almost Everything Wrong, Tax Return Preparation Indictment: From 44 To Three, When Fraudulent Tax Return Filing Is Part of A Bigger Fraudulent Scheme, Preparers Preparing Fraudulent Returns Need Prepare Not Only for Fines and Prison But Also Injunctions, Sins of the Tax Return Preparer Father Passed on to the Tax Return Preparer Son, Tax Return Preparer Fraud Extends Beyond Tax Returns, When A Tax Return Preparer’s Bad Behavior Extends Beyond Fraud, More Thoughts About Avoiding Tax Return Preparers Gone Bad, Another Tax Return Preparer Fraudulent Loan Application Indictment, Yet Another Way Tax Return Preparers Can Harm Their Clients (and Employees), When Unscrupulous Tax Return Preparers Make It Easy for theblo IRS and DOJ to Find Them, Tax Return Preparers Putting Red Flags on Clients’ Returns, When Language Describing the Impact of Tax Fraud Matters, Injunctions Against Fraudulent Tax Return Preparers Help, But Taxpayers Still Need to Be Vigilant, Will the Re-Introduced Legislation Permitting Tax Return Preparer Regulation Be Enacted, and If So, Would It Make a Difference?, Can Fraudulent Tax Return Preparation Become An Addiction?, Tax Return Preparers Who Fail to File Their Own Returns Beg For IRS Attention, Using a Tax Return Preparer? Take Steps to Verify What Is Filed on Your Behalf, When Dishonest Tax Return Preparers Are Married, There Was Nothing Magical About This Tax Return Preparation Business, Don’t Get Burned By a Tax Return Preparer, Tax Fraud School: When It’s Not Enough to Be a Fraudulent Tax Return Preparer, It’s Not Just Tax Return Preparers Assisting in the Preparation of Fraudulent Tax Returns, Overused Fraudulent Tax Return Preparation Ploys, It’s Not Just Law Enforcement That Confronts Misbehaving Tax Return Preparers, When An Injunction Doesn’t Stop a Tax Return Preparer from Filing False Returns, Filing a Fraudulent Tax Return Is Bad, Filing More Than 3,000 Is Outrageously Bad, When It Comes to Fraudulent Tax Returns, It's Not Always the Preparers, A Procedural Twist on Dealing with Fraudulent Tax Return Preparers, Can Tax Return Preparers Learn from the Misdeeds of Other Preparers?, Should Tax Return Preparers Use Their Full Legal Names?, Is There Ever a Free Lunch, Even in the Tax Return Preparation Business?, Is the Tax Return Preparer or the Client Responsible For Unjustified Deductions?, When Preparing False Tax Returns Seems to Lack a Financial Motive, and Was This Convicted Tax Return Preparer Courageous or Foolish?

Recently, reader Morris directed my attention to a news story out of San Antonio, Texas that described the sentencing of a tax return preparer who pleaded guilty to one of 15 counts of aiding and assisting the filing of false tax returns. The other 14 counts were dropped as part of the plea deal. The preparer was sentenced to five years of probation and ordered to pay restitution of almost $137,000. The IRS estimated the preparer prepared between 1,000 and 1,500 returns each year and that the tax loss from her placing false items on customers’ returns caused the Treasury to lose, at a minimum, almost $1.4 million.

Reader Morris asked. “How did this tax preparer avoid prison?” The answer requires an understanding of how the plea bargain system works. There is a lot of subjectivity in the disposition of criminal cases, most of which don’t go to trial but are settled by plea deals. Prosecutors are willing to agree to let defendants get lighter sentences in exchange for avoiding the costs and risks of going to trial. Ultimately it is up to the judge to determine whether the plea deal should be accepted though almost all of them are. If a plea deal includes prison rather than probation, a defendant is more likely to reject it. The question of whether probation should be imposed rather than a prison term arises in all sorts of criminal cases, not just tax fraud situations. Probation is more likely to be part of a deal when the crime is considered a “white collar” crime rather than one of violence. I don’t know what sort of negotiations took place in working out the plea deal in the San Antonio case. So I cannot answer the specific question posed by reader Morris.

Reader Morris also offered a comment that reflected a fact noted in the news story. He offered, “I would avoid a tax preparer who works out of a adult bookstore.” His comment was inspired by the fact that in 2019 the preparer operated the business in an adult bookstore. The preparer had been in a different location from 2017 to 2019 and later moved from the adult bookstore to another location. Who knows why the preparer rented space in an adult bookstore? Was it the only available and affordable location? Was it an attempt to expand clientele? Was it part of a marketing arrangement with the adult book store? How many people would be comfortable going into an adult bookstore to have their tax returns prepared? My guess is that most people would agree with the comment from reader Morris. Imagine being seen going into an adult bookstore by a spouse, family member, relative, or some other person whose reaction would not be ideal, and then claiming, “Oh, I went in to get my tax return prepared.” How believable is that? But since it can be proven to be true by those who did have their tax returns prepared at the store, perhaps the store owner decided to created an easy-to-prove excuse for regular customers. The details of the arrangement between the store and the preparer are unknown.

So would you go into an adult bookstore to have your tax returns prepared? I don’t face that question because I prepare my own returns, but if I did need a preparer I would not be looking for one in an adult bookstore, or a casino, or a grocery store, or an auto repair shop, to name a few places where I would not search.