Hollywood's new financiers make deals with state tax credits

ATLANTA — Ric Reitz makes movies. He helped bankroll the Matt Damon thriller "Contagion," Clint Eastwood's "Trouble With the Curve" and the Robert Downey comedy "Due Date."

Reitz, an energetic 58-year-old, doesn't hang out at the Polo Lounge, red-carpet premieres or swank offices in Century City. Instead, he works out of a former cotton mill near Martin Luther King Jr.'s boyhood home, hustling for business at Chamber of Commerce dinners and Rotary Club lunches. Recently, he was looking forward to attending a meeting of prosperous chicken farmers.

Reitz is one of Hollywood's new financiers. Just about every major movie filmed on location gets a tax incentive, and Reitz is part of an expanding web of brokers, tax attorneys, financial planners and consultants who help filmmakers exploit the patchwork of state programs to attract film and TV production.

ON LOCATION: Where the cameras roll

In his case, he takes the tax credits given to Hollywood studios for location filming and sells them to wealthy Georgians looking to shave their tax bills — doctors, pro athletes, seafood suppliers, beer distributors and the like.

"I've got a giant state of people who are potential buyers," he said. "It's the funniest people who are hiding under stones."

The trade benefits both sides. The studios get their money more quickly than if they had to wait for a tax refund from the state, and the buyers get a certificate that enables them to cut their state tax bills as much 15%.

Via: LA Times
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NATION'S POOR AT 49.7M, HIGHER THAN OFFICIAL RATE

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The number of poor people in America is 3 million higher than the official count, encompassing 1 in 6 residents due to out-of-pocket medical costs and work-related expenses, according to a revised census measure released Wednesday.

The new measure is aimed at providing a fuller picture of poverty but does not replace the official government numbers. Put in place two years ago by the Obama administration, it generally is considered more reliable by social scientists because it factors in living expenses as well as the effects of government aid, such as food stamps and tax credits.

Administration officials have declined to say whether the new measure eventually could replace the official poverty formula, which is used to allocate federal dollars to states and localities and to determine eligibility for safety-net programs such as Medicaid.

Congress would have to agree to adopt the new measure, which generally would result in a higher poverty rate from year to year and thus higher government payouts for aid programs.

Via: AP

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IRS released preliminary report on ObamaCare inquiries

The IRS on Saturday reported handling more than 330,000 requests from ObamaCare exchanges to calculate whether Americans are eligible for federal tax credits when purchasing insurance through the program.

The release provides some indication on how many people are attempting to buy insurance through the exchanges in their first four weeks of operation and how many are seeking federal financial assistance.

The agency said it is receiving about 80,000 data requests daily.

The IRS said it “remains on track with implementing its portion of the Affordable Care Act and continues actively supporting the Health Insurance Marketplaces,” amid widespread problems with the online exchanges and resulting backlash.

The Obama administration has yet to release information on the number of Americans who have bought insurance through the exchange, perhaps the best indicator of public interest and the success of the program, but has vowed to in the coming months.

The IRS also reported that it has received and responded to more than 1.3 million requests from the marketplaces about household income and the size of families, which the agency called “critical” information in determining applicants’ eligibility for “income-based financial assistance.”

Via: Fox News

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IRS paid out $132 billion in bogus tax credits over last decade

The IRS paid as much as $13.6 billion in bogus claims for the Earned Income Tax Credit last year, according to a report the agency’s internal auditor released Tuesday morning.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration said it warned the IRS in 2011 that it was making the erroneous payments, but two years later the agency hasn’t fixed the problem.

Over the last decade, the IRS could have paid out as much as $132.6 billion in improper payments.

“The IRS has made little improvement in reducing improper EITC payments as a whole since it has been required to report estimates of these payments to Congress,” the inspector general said. “The IRS acknowledges that further reductions in the EITC improper payment rate will be difficult to achieve.”

Investigators said the IRS is still violating an executive order President Obama signed in 2009 telling agencies to come up with ways to reduce improper payments.

The EITC is designed to transfer money to the working poor through the tax system. But analysts said it is a complex program that is difficult to check for eligibility.

Bogus payments can include those that never should have been paid, or were paid out in the wrong amount. According to the audit, the improper payments accounted for between 21 percent and 25 percent of all EITC claims in 2012. That means between $11.6 billion and $13.6 billion was misspent.

Those figures do show a little progress. In 2010, as much as 29 percent of EITC payments were erroneous, accounting for up to $18.4 billion.

Via: Washington Times

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Two More Stimulus-Backed Solar Companies Announce Layoffs

A pair of foreign-owned solar companies that benefited from a combined $84 million in Energy Department tax credits have announced they will lay off employees.

One of the companies, German-owned SolarWorld, was integral in the fight for tariffs against the importation of Chinese photovoltaic solar panels. The other, Chinese company SunTech, blamed those tariffs for its own layoffs.

Both companies benefited from the Energy Department’s stimulus-funded Advanced Energy Manufacturing (48C) Tax Credit. The 48C credit is worth up to 30% of the cost of manufacturing qualifying green energy projects.

SolarWorld received a credit worth $82 million, while SunTech’s was worth $2.1 million.

Both companies announced this week that they will shed some employees. SolarWorld, which announced a 47% revenue decline in the third quarter, blamed a potential 37 layoffs at its Oregon plant on “illegal” Chinese trade practices.

SunTech said the U.S. International Trade Commission’s 35.95% tariff on Chinese solar panels was partially responsible for the 50 impending layoffs at its Arizona production facilities.

While heavy Chinese subsidies do reduce the cost of solar panels from that country, Heritage’s Derek Scissors warned against replicating those policies in testimonybefore the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in June.

“The U.S. boasts a far better energy and environmental record than China,” Scissors explained, “and moving in China’s direction would be very risky.”

SunTech and SolarWorld are the latest additions to a long list of taxpayer-backed green energy companies that have gone bankrupt, laid off workers, or otherwise hit dire financial straits.

Via: The Foundry

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Illegal Aliens and Federal Benefits

Theoretically, the law forbids illegal aliens from receiving benefits reserved for American citizens with the exception of emergency Medicaid. In practice, it does not prevent any of them from applying for and receiving benefits paid for by American taxpayers who sometimes, are themselves denied benefits.

Emergency Medicaid provided in emergency rooms, although well intentioned, has been used and abused by illegal aliens as their own personal physician, resulting in the bankruptcy of many small hospitals across the nation, particularly in California.

Federal benefits distributed to illegal aliens include: grants, contracts, loans, professional and commercial licenses, retirement, welfare, WIC, disability, public housing, college education, Pell grants, food stamps, tax credits, earned income credits, tax refunds, and unemployment benefits

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The Census Bureau reports 40 million foreign-born people residing in the United States. In this category, one-third is estimated to be illegal aliens. Liberal mainstream media calls them “undocumented workers,” “in the shadows residents,” or “unauthorized residents.”

According to the Pew Hispanic Center there were 11.2 million “unauthorized immigrants” in 2010. Their in-house demographer, Jeffrey Passel, used 2008 Current Population Survey (CPS) to estimate “the number of persons living in families in which the head of household or the spouse was an authorized alien,” for a total of 8.8 million families. Liberals like to redefine illegal aliens with euphemisms that suit their agenda. Other sources publish much higher numbers of illegals.

Illegal alien families are likely to have U.S. citizen children or “anchor babies.” These families are given “mixed status” by the Congressional Research Service. Passel also estimates that one in three illegal alien children is poor. This is obvious since illegal aliens have fled their home countries mostly for economic reasons and dire poverty.

Liberals lobby Congress to deal with illegal aliens based on controversies such as demographic issues, how to treat illegal families that have “anchor babies” who are U.S. citizens, and how strict identification requirements may hurt Americans who are denied benefits.

Via: Canada Free Press

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