Speaker 1: You can, I see this all the time where you've just been selected, right? And here's a letter and we just want to verify some stuff. Be careful about going back to whoever prepared that return and kind of pointing the finger at them and going, well, what did you do wrong? They may not have done a single thing wrong. You may have just gotten selected for an audit, right? And then the bad thing about it is the taxpayer bears the burden of not only substantiating everything,

Speaker 2: but then paying to cover the cost of that audit, right? And here's the deal. Just because, you know, you had a preparer prepare your return. Doesn't mean that preparer is qualified to represent you. That's right. Okay. So you got to be careful with that. You have to have specific credentialing to actually represent the client. Yeah. Okay. Another area that they're ramping up. And I think you and I met with someone the other day about this, guys. And y'all have seen this on TikTok. Everyone has seen this is, they're going to start ramping up the audits for private jet usage. Okay. Everybody's going to want to go buy a new private jet. It's on the radar, Rick. It's on the radar. It's ramping up audits of corporate jets to collect more and unpaid taxes. So they're going to push increase enforcement

Speaker 1: towards those wealthier taxpayers. Yeah. I mean, this is purely, you know, it used to be the yachts, right? People that would buy the yachts and run it through their business. Now it's the private jets, but it's basically, you got to have a legitimate purpose for buying a jet and running it through your business. Right. And it can't be just so that I can fly the family to Disney World next month. It's got to be in the business, being used by the business more than 50%. Yep. And, you know, there's all kinds of rules about, you know, where it's got to be located and things of that nature. But, you know, just be careful for, for declaring any kind of use of an object that looks like it's going to be mostly for

Speaker 2: private use. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel came out and told the reporters the other day that, you know, one of the things is they're concerned about is executives and shareholders that are utilizing these corporate private jets per se, for personal reasons, for that specific reason. And then that would essentially claim income for them because they're receiving a benefit for being able to fly for free. Yeah. And so it's, you know,

Speaker 1: basically it falls under the fringe benefits thing. Right. And there's some specific rules on what a fringe benefit is and how it can be excluded out of your income. And there's thresholds. And those dollar thresholds are not very high. And you think about the cost of a private jet, just even one flight, what it would typically cost, it's going to exceed a fringe benefit

Speaker 2: threshold. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. So kind of backtracking a little bit, I know our slides are just a little bit off on this regard. But, you know, you were talking about earlier, Rick, about, hey, don't buy it completely. You know, like they said, we're only going to target people making 400,000 and above. I think that's what Biden said. I don't buy that at all. Historically, here's a chart that we have right here. And you can see right there as far as audits for wealthy people had actually, if you see that, had actually went down in 2020 and 2021. It started to go up just a little bit in 2022, but they were saying the same thing at that time as well. Yeah. And so, guys, I would just, I would just, you know, side on, be a little more cautious, make sure that who's preparing your returns can represent you, that you're crossing your T's dotting your I's. And don't be oblivious. Don't be naive thinking that if you made 200,000, 100,000, 250, that you're off the radar. I wouldn't say that's not true at all. No. I just, I'm sorry. I know there's information being published out there about it. I just, I have a hard time believing it.

Speaker 1: We hear this refrain all the time from the government that we're trying to go after the big bad millionaires that don't pay their fair share of taxes. And the truth of the matter is, it's easier to go after the people that just have a couple of hundred bucks in their pocket than it

Speaker 2: is to go after the people. Yeah, because they can't afford representation. That's right. Slow hanging fruit. Yeah. Sad, but it's true. So this leads me into what we talked about you know, your preparer may not have the ability, right, to protect you. One of the things that we offer at our firm, and we do make it selective. Okay. But we highly, highly recommend it. Okay. Because if you're ever chosen for an audit, it is extremely expensive. It is. Okay. And so what we do is once we file your tax return, if you check the box, and you say you want us to represent you for a small fee, we're not going to go over that here.