Contact Attorney Richard Keyt: 480-664-7478|rk@keytlaw.com

Breadth of New FTC Blogger Regs

Overlawyered.com:  Walter Olson worries about the chilling effect the new FTC ad rule will have on people and the FTC’s selective enforcement of the regulation.  I agree.

An editorial in today’s

[October 12, 2009] New York Times, despite a bit of concessionary fluff about not wanting ‘to hamstring the ability of bloggers and twitterers to report and comment about the world,’ enthusiastically endorses the new rules.  It says not one word about the dangers of overbreadth, de minimis triviality, chilling effects, or selective enforcement.  Nor (unlike the L.A. Times’s far more nuanced editorial) does it inform readers that the FTC is proposing in some respects to regulate social media more stringently than traditional media outlets such as the Times itself.

Eagle Scout Suspended for 20 Days for Pocketknife in Car

FoxNews.com:  “A 17-year-old Eagle Scout in upstate New York has been barred from stepping foot on school grounds for 20 days — for keeping a 2-inch pocketknife locked in a survival kit in his car.  Matthew Whalen, a senior at Lansingburgh Senior High School, says he follows the Boy Scout motto and is always prepared, stocking his car with a sleeping bag, water, a ready-to-eat meal — and the knife, which was given to him by his grandfather, a police chief in a nearby town.”

Freeze: It’s the Twitter Police!

Wall St. Journal:  “What Eliot Ness was to mobsters and Inspector Clouseau was to fictional jewel thieves, Brendan Wilhide is to Twitter.  Yes, the popular social-networking tool now has an enforcer—public-relations specialist by day, Internet private eye by night.   With more than one-third of the NBA, hundreds of NFL players and scores of major leaguers on Twitter, Mr. Wilhide spends several hours a day determining which athletes’ accounts are phonies and which are legit.  When he confirms imposter “tweets”—the short text messages sent out to people who sign up for Twitter updates—he posts an alert on his Web site, SportsIn140.com.”

Will California’s New Anti-Paparazzi Law Unleash a Torrent of Law Suits?

Wall St. Journal:  “In 2005, the Governator signed a law that allowed for huge fines against paparazzi found guilty of assaulting a picture subject and could force photographers to hand over income from any photos taken during an altercation.  Now, it’s not just the photographers themselves that are fair game.  California passed a law this week that allows civil law suits against media outlets that publish photos snapped illegally.”

GAO Study Finds 70% of Sole Proprietorships Under Pay Tax

The Government Accountability Office released the results of a study called “Tax Gap: Limiting Sole Proprietor Loss Deductions Could Improve Compliance but Would Also Limit Some Legitimate Losses,” aka GAO-09-81.

About 5.4 million or 25% of all sole proprietors reported losses in 2006. 95% percent of these loss filers deducted some or all of their losses against other income, deducting a total of $40 billion. According to IRS estimates last made for 2001, 70% of the sole proprietor tax returns reporting losses had losses that were either fully or partially noncompliant. About 53% of aggregate dollar losses reported in 2001 were noncompliant. This noncompliance would correspond to billions of dollars of lost tax revenue.

IRS’s compliance programs address only a small portion of sole proprietor expense noncompliance. Despite investing nearly a quarter of all revenue agent time in 2008, IRS was able to examine (audit) about 1 percent of estimated noncompliant sole proprietors. These exams are costly and yielded less revenue than exams of other categories of taxpayers, in part because sole proprietorships are small in terms of receipts.

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