Word: caplining
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...your excellent article on Mortimer Caplin and our federal tax mess [Feb. 1], you stated: "Caplin has proposed regulations that all T. & E. [travel and entertainment] deductions be itemized if they amount to more than $25. At first he put the figure...
...Washington Caplin is still running hard. "His briefcase never leaves his side," sighs his wife Ruth. But Caplin seldom misses his weekly Saturday workout in the Pentagon gym with his three sons. (He also has two daughters, giving him a total of seven exemptions on his income tax.) Only five pounds over his college fighting weight. Caplin often lunches on Metrecal at his desk, always bends and stretches through a strenuous course of calisthenics no matter how late he gets home. "I lie in bed and count for him." says Ruth. "It does me a lot of good...
Prophetic Exceptions. The tangled income tax laws that Commissioner Caplin is charged with enforcing were messy right from the beginning. Within a few years after the U.S. first imposed an income tax, to help finance the Civil War, President Lincoln apologized to the nation for the "inequities in the practical applications." But he added: "If we should wait before collecting a tax, to adjust the taxes upon each man in exact proportion with every other, we should never collect...
Helping Righteousness. Despite the tax code's complexities and invitations to cheat, Commissioner Caplin thinks the U.S. taxpayer behaves remarkably well by world standards. "No other country in the world," he says, "can approach the percentage of citizens who pay taxes promptly, report all their income, and take only the allowable deductions." But Caplin is not a man to sit back and hope that righteousness will prevail unassisted by enforcement. He has warned taxpayers that the IRS would crack down, for example, on the art-donation loophole. And he has intensified IRS scrutiny of returns submitted by high income...
...Caplin has plenty of justification for looking hard at those "T. & E." deductions. "It is impossible to delineate accurately between business and nonbusiness expenses," he says, "and each decision must necessarily be arbitrary to some extent. But experience discloses widespread abuse of the tax law in this area-abuse which strikes at the heart of our self-assessment tax system." Samples...