Free Tax Tips

Fair Tax: The Truth: Answering the Critics

This book published in 2008 is all about Fair Tax. In 2005, firebrand radio talk show host Neal Boortz and Georgia congressman John Linder created The FairTax Book, presenting the American public with a bold new plan designed to eliminate federal taxes and the IRS, jump-start the U.S. economy, bring back lost industries and jobs, and recapture billions of untaxed dollars hoarded by criminal and offshore businesses. Their book became an immediate #1 New York Times bestseller, propelling a powerful grassroots tax reform movement that’s spreading like wildfire across our nation.

Now, three years later, the authors are back to answer the outspoken and misinformed critics of their innovative proposal. Offering eye-opening new insights not covered in the original book, FairTax: The Truth debunks the negative myths and gross misrepresentations of this groundbreaking idea. The FairTax plan is simple, brilliant, and it will work—enabling you to keep all the money in your paycheck; eliminating the fraud, hassle, and waste of our current system; and revolutionizing the way America pays for itself.

About the Author

The host of radio’s The Neal Boortz Show, syndicated in nearly two hundred national markets, Neal Boortz is the author (with Congressman John Linder) of the New York Times bestsellers The FairTax Book and FairTax: The Truth, and author of The Terrible Truth About Liberals. He has been nominated twice for the National Association of Broadcasters’ Marconi Award and divides his time between Atlanta, Georgia, and Naples, Florida.

Your plain-English guide to filing your own returns accurately and on time

Are you dreading tax season? Never fear — this bestselling guide takes you through the major tax forms line by line, explaining all the latest filing changes. Financial expert Eric Tyson and tax experts Margaret Munro and David Silverman answer all your tax-preparation questions, offer tax-planning advice, and show you how to legally reduce your taxes!

• Ready, set, file — assemble the tools you need to prepare your own return, select your filing status, and determine exemptions
• Tackle the various forms — from 1040EZ to Schedule E, understand how to fill out each form correctly and painlessly
• Comprehend all the tax law changes — understand child tax benefits, improved Health Savings Accounts, Alternative Minimum Tax changes, small-business perks, mortgage forgiveness debt relief, and more
• Negotiate with the IRS — decipher an assessment notice, survive an audit, fix common IRS mistakes, and locate missing refunds
• Clean up your own errors — amend a return, abate penalties or interest, and make the right moves when you can’t pay your taxes

Praise for Taxes For Dummies

“The best of these books for tax novices.” – — Worth magazine

“The most accessible and creative. It’s also the best organized.” – — USA Today

“Will make tax preparation less traumatic.” – — The Wall Street Journal

“Sound financial advice you can use throughout the year.” – — The Seattle Times

Open the book and find:

• How to itemize your deductions
• Hints for keeping good records and staying organized
• Smart year-round personal finance and tax advice
• Questions to ask a tax advisor
• Ways to maximize tax software and e-filing options
• How to file if you’re self-employed
• Tax tips for military families
• Tips for reducing your taxes and avoiding penalties

If you have ever wondered about the IRS collection process and how to handle a tax collector, then this book called Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS is a great book for you. It provides a lot of insights into how tax collection works from someone working for the IRS.

Imagine if Brad Meltzer or John Grisham’s first book had been a memoir about working for the Internal Revenue Service and you have an idea of just how thrilling Richard Yancey’s Confessions of a Tax Collector: One Man’s Tour of Duty Inside the IRS really is.

Serving as a revenue agent–or, more informally, a tax collector–of the IRS for two years, Yancey went through strange transformations–from a tall, pencil-thin theater major, in an unforgiving relationship with no steady income, to a mean, muscle-wielding, unyielding revenue officer at the top of his game. What happens in between this tax collecting, money-hungry metamorphosis makes this memorable memoir the stuff of great fiction.

The Americans who shirk tax laws and responsibilities are inevitably tracked, coded, analyzed, pursued, and in general, marked for tax collection by a legion of government workers take center stage.

“We have superior intelligence; we know more about our enemies’ lives than they know about themselves. We know where they are. We know what they do. We know what they have. We will execute what they fear,” Yancey writes. Just envision the line-up of misfits and average joes who populate the screen on Cops or America’s Funniest Home Videos and you’ll be close to imagining the range of people Yancey tangles with.

Vengeful middle managers, hard-working small business owners, mean-spirited tax protestors, hardened tax evaders–the list of characters goes on and on. Every one of the people tracked within the walls of Yancey’s local IRS office has the same, pitiful problem: the tax man cometh and the “beast needs to be fed.” Equal parts love story, business tale, high-speed chase, and self-evolution, Yancey’s Confessions of a Tax Collector packs plenty of human drama–all of it experienced and survived by one man. –E. Brooke Gilbert

From Publishers Weekly

After failing at a number of jobs, Yancey joined the IRS as a revenue officer in 1991 when he answered a want ad in the newspaper. As a revenue officer, Yancey was charged with collecting taxes from delinquent taxpayers. At the start of his career, Yancey was ambivalent about working for the IRS, but the longer he stayed with the organization the more seriously he took the job. A turning point came during a seizure (when the IRS seizes property from people who have been unable or unwilling to pay taxes), when Yancey stumbled across a band of tax protesters and took it as a personal challenge to root out as many protesters as possible-and in the course of doing so found himself living for his job.

Yancey’s account of his 12-year career starts out as a lighthearted look at his early days as an IRS trainee, but the tone is more somber and reflective as he becomes more enmeshed in his job, breaks up with his girlfriend, and finds himself isolated from nearly everyone outside of his workplace.

There is a happy ending to the story, however, as Yancey marries his supervisor, quits the service and fulfills his dream of writing a book. His description of what life is like inside the IRS is generally engaging and shows the fallibility of a system that comprises, after all, men and women who have their own strengths and weaknesses. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.