For many reasons — some of which are justified and necessary, and others that frankly do not make sense and obfuscate rather than clarify — the Internal Revenue Code (IRC) is an excessively complex set of volumes, which contain laws enforced by the IRS (published as Title 26 of the United States Code/USC).

Partly due to this inherent complexity — and also because the web is riddled with incomplete, misleading or outright wrong “advice” on tax controversies— there continues to be significant confusion around two fundamentally separate concepts: tax fraud and tax negligence.   Read more →