You may be surprised to find out that if you regularly purchase goods online, you’re likely also regularly breaking the law. How so? It’s because you may be inadvertently disregarding the “use tax” on those goods.  

Freelancers do it, nonprofits do it, even up-and-coming family businesses (as well as 70 percent of all Fortune 500 companies) do it. No, it’s not falling in love. It’s trading goods and bartering services. And you may be surprised to know that it’s an entirely taxable event.

Wilco, Coldplay, Radiohead. What do these rock bands have in common? It’s more than just great music, it’s a passion for ending tax havens (sheltering money in a foreign country or independent area where taxes are low). Surprisingly, rock bands have a long and fascinating history when it comes to forging ahead into uncharted tax strategy territories. 

You may have heard that IRS audits of individuals have hit an 11-year low. This past year, the IRS has been auditing fewer than 1 in 100 individual taxpayers. But don’t allow those statistics to embolden you. Thousands of taxpayers still get audited each year. If you’re a high-earner, with $500,000 to $1 million earned annually, your chances of an audit jump to more than 4 percent. The picture changes again when it comes to business audits. Corporations tend to be audited more often (as much as 12 percent of large corporations).

Last year, Ars Technica reports, the IRS shut down an electronic tool for obtaining tax data after a massive fraud operation involving commercial data breaches managed to extract filing data for hundreds of thousands of taxpayers. This year, the IRS is facing a new wave of fraud, as criminals engage in a phishing campaign to obtain employees' W-2 form data.

Tax fraud comes in many shapes and sizes. In fact, the IRS estimates that 17 percent of all taxpayers fail to comply with tax laws in one way or another. Cash-intensive businesses and service industry workers are the worst offenders. The IRS claims that waiters and waitresses underreport their cash tips by an average of 84 percent.

In April, we introduced the growing trend of third-party litigation financing to help offset the cost of litigation. Since then a specific case has catapulted the idea into the mainstream. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Peter Thiel, founding investor in PayPal and Facebook, has provided about $10 million to support pro-wrestler Hulk Hogan in an invasion-of-privacy lawsuit against Gawker Media

Low unemployment rates are a good thing, right? For business owners, it can be a mixed bag. The current job market means that attracting and retaining top employees is critically important. Essentially, there are more jobs than there are good candidates to fill them.  

As we head into business conference season, now is a great time to review the rules concerning business travel expenses. Using a per diem rate to reimburse business travel is often misunderstood. Typically, the record keeping is simpler under this method as the federal government has established fixed reimbursement amounts per day for business travel that cover lodging, meals and incidentals.

You may have a great track record in the courtroom, but are you willing to bet on it? An increasing number of U.S. litigators are, following a trend called third party litigation financing (TPLF) or alternative litigation financing (ALF). This type of litigation financing often uses hedge funds and other investment principles to fund the litigation process for plaintiffs’ attorneys.