Tax continuing education is essential for accountants as tax laws change constantly and with every Republican victory at the polls comes a new group of corporate giveaways.
With a tax code that spans some sixty thousand pages, somebody’s got to keep an eye on it all!
And those somebodies have a lot on their plate.
Hence all the continuous keeping up with industry developments – namely, changes in the tax code.
So chalk it up to the smart bean-counters at General Electric and their tax continuing education courses for helping the company post its newest achievement in the history of corproate notoriety: zero tax liability for the filing season ending in 2011.
That’s right: this year, one of the world’s richest multi-billion-dollar companies will pay
no taxes.
None whatsoever!
And that’s not all.
They may actually be owed some money instead!
That’s right – the government may truly have to pay G.E. some money.
How’s that for tax continuing education!
It’s incredible but all completely true.
Through the imaginative use of loss write-offs and the like, the accounting department at G.E. has been able to save its employer a lot of money, with the chance of getting money “back” from Uncle Sam on top of that.
This is in addition to the use of unpaid labor all through the business in the form of college interns, such as at its NBC subsidiary.
Obviously, it isn’t just G.E. and NBC that’s benefiting from such unethical and even illegal practices.
Viacom and subsidiary Paramount Pictures also makes use of such loopholes.
Most corporations of a particular size do.
’80s boogeyman Leona “Queen of Mean” Helmsley was only telling the truth when she scoffed that “only little people pay taxes.”
Under the right conditions – which are not as rare as one might imagine at first – it is entirely possible to keep all the money you generate while making use of public services.
