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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33485 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023

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Reading the article, I was thinking this illustrated the difference between playing ball and playing the victim.

I didn’t realize he’d paid the debt. Doing so is really the last word in cooperation. If we want to incentivize that, the cooperator has to get a lighter punishment than the defector.

But the whole point is you need to punish fraud regardless of whether upon being caught you cough up the cash. Most returns aren’t audited. So if you are wealthy you can (1) play audit lottery and (2) cooperate if found out.

Yes, cooperating should be better than further defecting but only marginally.

Did he do fraud? He plead guilty to failure to pay, but not evasion. They're not alleging he set up some illegal shell companies to hide his income, just that he didn't pay what he owed.

The game theory about how to punish attempted fraud vs. late payments seem meaningfully different.

Below is from the whistleblower under oath. Note the whistleblower stated they specifically wanted to charge for evasion; not just failure to pay and that Hunter did in fact evade. Evidently this was agreed to by staff attorneys and it was only when it got to effectively political appointment levels that the charges were rebuked.

And so the way the money worked is there's a document which is the contract between Burisma and Hunter Biden. Those are the two parties. It was for $1 million per year. Of course this was 2014, and it was negotiated in April, so the payments in that year were reduced by the months. So it was $666,000, $83,000 a month he was receiving.

What Hunter Biden did with that is he told Burisma to send that income to Rosemont Seneca Bohai. And then when the money came back to him, he booked it as a loan.

So there's all this machinations of nonsense happening over here in this nominee structure that, "Oh, this is complex, this is complex," and, well, it's not complex, because this is -- it was a taxable event as soon as the income came from Burisma to Hunter Biden. And whatever he did with it after it was really just a scheme to evade taxes for that year.

And to add to it, is that Rosemont Seneca Bohai and Archer, when the money came back to Hunter Biden, they booked that as an expense on their books. So even the two parties didn't treat it the same way.

And then Eric Schwerin realized this and looked into it, and he even told

Hunter Biden on multiple occasions, multiple communications, you need to amend your 2014 return to include the Burisma income. And he never did, and the statute's gone

Correct. His tax fraud scheme is far larger and more complex than the DOJ document indicates. It clearly should have been charged as a felony, and most likely should have been sentenced as a LVL 14 offense (because of the size and complexity elevators). So what should have happened in this case is he'd have 2 level 14 offenses for tax fraud, and one level 12/14 offense for lying on a gun form. That gets you to a lvl 15. Pleading out drops you to 13. But that is still Zone B, so prison time is virtually guaranteed.

That’s ignoring the meth charges, FARA, and transporting hookers across state lines.

Yes that is what he pleaded to but it isn’t uncommon to plead to a lesser crime. It seems the Republicans (and the IRS team that was taken off) seemingly are suggesting there was more income — 8+ million). Whether that is true is I guess TBD.

He also set up a system whereby his compensation from burisma was paid to a controlled partnership but he then tried to claim he received no distributive income but a loan. That is, he created a sham that his own accountant allegedly told him didn’t work.

Seems a bit more than garden variety tax fraud.

It sounds like him being dumber than garden variety tax fraudsters.

You don't need to be smart when you have the whole DOJ in your pocket.

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