[ale] GnuCash [OT]

[Lightner, Jeff]

OK I misunderstood your earlier email.   However, as I noted before whether you signed such a thing for the State of Georgia and not the IRS is immaterial.   Court findings were generally that if you CAN pay and don't there is no excuse and you become personally liable.   I saw these cases at all levels (city, county, state, IRS,  SSN etc...).

If you are able to generate payroll tax payments to the IRS (and SSN) but for any reason do not do so you are personally responsible.     If you have access to the checks and can write them you must do so.  If you have signing authority for checks written by others you must sign.  If you are in the mail room you must mail the checks.   ANY place where an individual COULD have effected the payment being made but DIDN'T they become personally responsible.    Orders to the contrary are deemed illegal by the courts so even if you're a lowly mail clerk and the CEO of your Fortune 500 company comes and tells you NOT to mail the checks that just landed on your desk you can become personally responsible for the payment if it is never made.

There were also cases about business partners/ex-spouses that had clearly violated the law unbeknownst to the other party but the courts have generally held they are responsible still because of the linked nature of the taxes.   I think subsequent law has changed some of the latter though - these days divorced spouses have to show custody orders to claim children.   In the past even with such orders where a wife clearly had custody and claimed the children she'd end up being held accountable because the deadbeat dad had also claimed the children and HE couldn't pay.

Many of the cases I read boggled my mind by the apparent unfairness or unreasonableness implied.  (What mail room clerk is going to argue with a CEO?).   However in reality it is very simple:  If you don't want to become personally liable for a payment you have ignore such orders and let them fire you.   (Ideally what you'd actually do is resign before the payment was due so you couldn't be seen as the one that impeded the remittance.)







-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of mike at trausch.us
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2012 12:44 PM
To: ale at ale.org
Subject: Re: [ale] GnuCash [OT]

On 08/01/2012 11:59 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> Right but it’s one thing to be on the hook for something that you “own”
> (even if you’ve incorporated) and being on the hook for a much larger
> corporation that at the time was collecting more in monthly sales taxes
> than my annual salary.   For your corporation you may feel personally
> responsible even when you’re not legally responsible.

No, I actually had to submit my name and SSN to Georgia's Department of Labor, and agree to accept personal liability for this corporation's
(payroll) taxes to be paid to Georgia.

To contrast, I had to make no such guarantees to the IRS.

> For someone
> else’s business taking personal responsibility for the things you can
> control is one thing – taking it for things that you can’t control is
> another issue.   Allowing someone in authority to try to make you
> operate contrary to laws/rules is just begging for it.    Even if you
> don’t get held personally responsible when it hits the fan you’re apt to
> pay the consequences in other ways.   There were many accountants at
> Enron who might not have been part of the actual scams but they saw
> what was happening and didn’t do anything to stop it – they all ended
> up out of work and if they had the company retirement plan heavily
> loaded with Enron stock also lost much of their savings.

I think we're mixing issues... Enron's was about accounting fraud, if I remember correctly.  WRT that, yes, everyone who touches it can wind up being personally liable.

Of course, right at the moment, I am also the sole person working with the books, so I have that to deal with as well... but we're also not a public corporation, nor do I plan to be.  Having public shareholders changes a corporate environment in a way that I would be very uncomfortable with unless I were to simultaneously disassociate myself from the corporation in every way conceivable, including getting someone else to agree to accept personal liability for GA taxes that the corporation owes.

        --- Mike

--
A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
                                   --- Carveth Read, “Logic”





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