In the comments to yesterday's post about Al Franken's tax woes, Curmudgeon asks:
Post Enron, I thought 'I just did what my accountants said' was no longer a valid excuse - legally or in the court of public opinion. Isn't this is the same excuse Skilling and Lay used?
This is not quite the same thing. For starters, as I undertand it, Al Franken wasn't engaging in concealing his financial position--he paid taxes on the income in Minnesota, when he should have paid taxes on it in seventeen different states. For another, the CEO of a corporation should expect to be reasonably familiar with the principles of financial accounting, and the various implications of moving substantial liabilities off balance sheet. Expecting a comedian to understand the tax law is somewhat less reasonable.
People pay their accountants to look at their records and tell them whom, and how much, to pay. Al Franken reasonably relied on his accountant to tell him to do the right thing. If he'd tried to conceal the income, I wouldn't have much sympathy, but he didn't. He just paid the taxes to the wrong place.
I'm second to none in my contempt for Al Franken, but I simply cannot figure out why this is news. He made a mistake, and possibly a dumb one, but he didn't actually do anything wrong.
Well, Al is running for Senate, and as such, will be responsible for tax law should he run. Perhaps Senators should understand what they're responsible for controlling.
Well, Al is running for Senate, and as such, will be responsible for tax law should he run.
1) He won't be responsible for state tax law, which is what got him in trouble, and
2) I'd love to meet any government official anywhere who never employs lawyers or other professionals for personal affairs. Show me the county councilman who gets his own building permits for a new house or the cabinet secretary who wrote the EIS, the zoning variance applicaiton, and the tax opinion for his last company's expansion plans. I'm a lawyer myself but I still hire other lawyers to do things like write my will and draft deeds for real property transfers.
Eric, I would imagine that only a certain number of our senators pay much attention to actual tax policy, as in the details rather than the general taxes too high taxes too low. I would also imagine that Franken would not be one of the people who would wade into the weeds of that particular part of our national policy.
OK, I haven't followed the Franken story, but he's been around for a while. Was it only in the last few years that he had significant income in multiple states for doing gigs? I thought that most comedians spend a lot of time on the road, and so it's surprising to me that he didn't know he'd have to pay taxes in all of the states where he worked. Unless back in his salad days his pay per gig was so low that it was either exempt under the laws of the states where he performed or the violation was so minor that it wasn't on their radar.
Al has had some very harsh words in the past for people who might have made an honest mistake like this. I wonder whether this will give him pause before he assigns malice to anyone who disagress with him. I, and many others here are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt here. Would he do the same? Will he going forward now that he sees the blade cuts both ways?
I kinda doubt it.
The problem with Al Franken's positions and his practice is not that he never paid the taxes, because apparently he did in some form or the other.
THe problem is that people like Franken and his fellow travelers constantly trivialize the monetary and NON-MONETARY costs of paying taxes. When the argument is made that a certain tax is onerous from a non-monetary persepective they brush off such claims. BUT HERE IS THE PROOF THAT SUCH CLAIMS ARE NOT TRIVIAL. WIll this change Mr. Franken's perspective? Absolutely not. He just does not care, because until he is caught he will never follow the rules.
And, Mr. Franken is just following in the path of other illustrious Minnesota "Progressive" politicians. His opponent's predessesor, Paul Wellstone, a very well meaning man who CARED about the little guy, did not provide workers compensation insurance on his employees either.
YOu would think that such advocates of these decrepit systems would follow their own rules, but absolutely not. WHen Senator Wellstone's plane tragically crashed, the staffers killed with him were not covered by workers comp.
I'm second only to -- or perhaps tied with -- Rob Lyman's contempt for Al Franken and I agree that this is not news.
There are a lot of reasons that Franken should not be a senator, minor mistakes in tax payment should not have to be one of them.
I also join in the spirit of other commenters here in hoping that this experience will teach Al and others like him to tone down the hateful invective when dealing with small or tangential problems encountered by ideological opponents. But, based on the entire history of mankind, I have no hope of this actually happening.
Mr. Franken was handed more insight into the burdens imposed by excessive governmental regulation and taxation than he'll get at a 100 town hall meetings. To this very distant observer he seems by temperament immune from the instruction the episode provides, but let's hope.
Al Franken is the head of a company with several million dollars in annual revenues. Shouldn't he have been conducting the occasional audit in order to make sure that all was operating properly? What if his accountant had been stealing from him? As someone else mentioned, he had been earning his living as a traveling performer for decades. One would assume that somewhere in that time he would have bothered to learn how to do so without violating laws and potentially ending up in prison. I had to do that when I started my far smaller business, and I am certain that Franken would have no mercy for me if my company had violated tax law out of my ignorance or my employee's incompetence.
Furthermore, this incident illustrates how we can expect Franken to run his Senate office should he be elected. He has no more expertise with the legislative process and the subjects on which he will be legislating than he does on state tax law and the proper reporting of earned income in multiple jurisdictions. He will have to hire and rely upon supposed experts just as he hired and relied upon his tax accountant. Will he also be hiring incompetents and failing to properly oversee them as Senator? If he claims the answer is no then perhaps he should explain why anyone should believe him. After all, nobody assumes he *wanted* to hire an incompetent tax preparer, so simply wanting to hire good people is not a solution.