Sunday, March 2 is National Egg McMuffin Day, celebrating the 50th anniversary of McDonald’s flagship breakfast menu item. The McMuffin was released in 1975, invented by Herb Peterson, who for some reason was looking for a way to put eggs benedict “in the palm of your hand.”¹

To celebrate, McDonald’s is offering egg McMuffins and sausage McMuffins for $1, only on March 2 and only if you order through the McDonald’s app. For the rest of March, you can get BOGO McMuffins delivered directly to you via the McDelivery option in the app.

In last week’s Tribune, I wrote an article titled “Business” autos: The bane of my existence.” If you missed out, you can read it here: https://bit.ly/41d3iV4

I think I hit a raw nerve with many of our readers because I received more direct e-mail responses to that article than any other article I have written in my nine years with Spidell. I responded to many, but the time constraints of tax season prohibited me from responding to everyone.

I take comfort in knowing that so many of us go through the same struggles and are confronted with the same client frustrations.

I communicate with so many tax professionals through e-mail, webinar Q&As, Message Board responses, and good old-fashioned face-to-face conversation at live seminars. I am always comforted when I hear another person in our industry let down their guard and admit to the annoyances in their practice or lament the errors they made along the way.

I don’t take pleasure in the hardship of others, but I take comfort in knowing that whatever I’m going through in my practice, nearly everyone else has gone through it, too.

I may not be able to respond to every e-mail that comes my way, but if you need to let it out, you know where to reach me: mikeg@spidell.com

It’s not the name of a band, it’s the revered beings responsible for everyone’s favorite energy elixir, 2.25 billion cups of which are consumed daily worldwide.¹ According to legend, Kaldi the Ethiopian goat herder discovered coffee when he noticed that his goats became energetic and would not sleep at night after eating berries from a certain tree. They were eating coffee cherries, and coffee beans are the seeds inside. Here are more fun facts to peruse as you enjoy your morning cup.

• Before becoming a drink, coffee was eaten. Early East African tribes would grind the cherries into a paste mixed with animal fat, forming small edible energy balls.²
• Each coffee cherry typically contains two seeds, but sometimes only one develops, creating what’s called a “peaberry,” which some consider to be superior in flavor.³
• The world’s most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, comes from partially digested coffee cherries eaten and defecated by Indonesian palm civets.⁴
• Coffee is the second most traded commodity in the world after oil. It employs over 125 million people globally.⁵
• Brazil has been the world’s largest coffee producer for over 150 years. They produce around one-third of all coffee globally.⁶

Meanwhile, if you rock as hard as you reconcile, and you’re thinking of forming an office band and need a name (and “LIFO the Party” isn’t doing it for you), Kaldi and the Goats is probably available. I predict a strong cult following, especially among the barista set.

The IRS Criminal Investigation Unit annually releases its top 10 cases from the prior year. Here are some highlights from the list of 2024 cases.¹

• The longest-running bitcoin money laundering service on the darknet has come to an end. A dual Russian-Swedish national was sentenced to 12 years and six months in prison for running Bitcoin Fog, a cryptocurrency mixer that allowed criminals to hide transactions involving over 1.2 million bitcoin, valued at approximately $400 million at the time the transactions occurred.
• A former Jacksonville Jaguars employee was sentenced to six years and six months in prison and ordered to forfeit $22 million in funds he embezzled from the team. He used the team’s virtual credit card program to make hundreds of purchases and transactions with no legitimate business purpose, and then created accounting files that contained numerous false and fraudulent entries and emailed them to the Jaguars’ accounting department. He used the funds to buy a condo and to purchase cryptocurrency, nonfungible tokens, electronics, sports memorabilia, a country club membership, spa treatments, concert and sporting event tickets, home furnishings, and luxury wrist watches.
• A former law firm partner was sentenced to 10 years in prison for money laundering in connection with the OneCoin international scheme. OneCoin is a multilevel marketing cryptocurrency scheme that originated in Bulgaria and has taken in more than $4 billion. The law firm partner had previously been convicted of laundering OneCoin proceeds for its founder Ruja Ignatova, the “Crypto Queen,” who is a fugitive on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.

Can we talk frankly about “business” autos? I can’t be the only tax professional who cringes every time a client says they bought a new car for their business that they insist is only used for business purposes.

In the most recent instance in my own practice, a lawyer told me that he bought a new Mercedes G550 in 2024 – a vehicle with a $150,000 price tag. He said he chose the G class because it has a gross vehicle weight rating over 6,000 lbs., therefore he can claim 60% bonus depreciation for the vehicle ($150,000 x 60% = $90,000 expected deduction).

When I informed my client that 60% bonus depreciation is only available for vehicles that have 100% business use, he insisted that he only used the car to commute to and from the office, therefore, the vehicle is 100% business. When I informed him that commuting to and from work is a personal expense and not a business expense, I got the usual “what do you mean commuting to and from work isn’t a business expense?” I’ve only explained this issue to clients a bajillion times.

I know my client’s business and I knew right away that his business mileage, if any, was probably 5% at best. Of course, he also had the firm purchase the vehicle. So now I have to deal with a vehicle owned by the business with 5% business mileage (if I’m lucky) and I’m sure the firm’s credit card will include car payments, gas, maintenance, etc.

This is only one of many, many different variations of business auto issues I encounter on a regular basis that have caused me to pull all my hair out (there’s none left). Do you hate business autos as much as I do? What business auto issues make you want to smash glass? Let me know via e-mail at mikeg@spidell.com.

The IRS denied a religious organization tax-exempt status because it served its members ayahuasca while it was awaiting a religious exemption from the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA).¹

Organizations that want to be classified as tax-exempt under §501(c)(3) have to demonstrate that their activities are legal and consistent with public policy. The organization in this case was a church whose members’ sincerely held beliefs involved the consumption of ayahuasca, a Schedule I controlled substance that contains DMT, which is a strong (and illegal) psychedelic drug.

Under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), there is a specific process for religious exemptions that allow for the use of controlled substances. To obtain the exemption, a religious organization must apply through the DEA, or a federal court can also issue an exemption.

The Iowaska Church of Healing applied for both tax-exempt status and a DEA religious exemption from the CSA. However, while those applications were still pending, the church conducted Ayahuasca tea ceremonies for its members. The IRS denied the §501(c)(3) exemption because the church engaged in illegal activity without a CSA exemption. The church cited Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente União do Vegetal,² claiming that case recognized the use of ayahuasca in religious ceremonies as an exercise of religion under the First Amendment. But the IRS countered, and the court agreed, that the church had misinterpreted O Centro to mean they could use ayahuasca without the CSA exemption. Rather, that case found that an organization does not have to apply for an exemption from the DEA before seeking relief in the courts.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s annual “Fix a Leak Week” is approaching: March 17 through 23, 2025. According to their website, household leaks nationwide waste almost 1 trillion gallons of water a year total. The website provides info on checking for various types of leaks, videos for how to fix simple leaks like leaky faucets, and other resources:

www.epa.gov/watersense/fix-leak-week

The USGS provides a drip calculator so you can get a sense of how much water is actually going to waste. They calculated the volume of one drip to be ¼ milliliter and you can see how that adds up at:

https://water.usgs.gov/edu/activity-drip.html

Okay, I have a confession to make. I have become one of the myriad of “golden agers” who have joined the pickleball craze. I was never one for team sports; they were always way too much pressure for me. But I could never resist a ping pong table, and there my inner competitive monster would always come out. Friends who had seen me at the ping pong table said I’d love pickleball and, no, it didn’t require nearly as much energy as tennis, so I thought, why not, “I’ll give it a try.” 

And that was the last mild-mannered phrase you have since heard me utter about pickleball.

Here are a few of the things I absolutely love about pickleball:

• You are constantly being yelled at to stay out of the kitchen;
• I’m nowhere near a computer;
• The majority of folks playing are my age or older;
• It’s a great way to meet people who are rarely going to have the time to ask you any tax questions; and
• Unlike golf, you can always find the ball after you hit it.

And now that I’ve become hooked, I highly recommend my fellow tax professionals to join in, especially during tax season. I know, you’re thinking I’m crazy, but hear me out.

First, pickleball scoring is significantly less complicated than calculating alternative minimum tax. When your brain is fried from determining whether your client’s crypto trades constitute a wash sale, there’s something refreshing about a scoring system that doesn’t require a master’s degree to understand. Plus, shouting “7-3-2!” is far more satisfying than working with balance sheets.

The “kitchen” rule in pickleball (where you can’t volley from the non-volley zone) is also oddly familiar to tax practitioners. Just as you wouldn’t dare step into the kitchen during a game, you know better than to step into certain tax positions without substantial authority. Both mistakes can result in painful penalties, though at least pickleball doesn’t involve IRS notices.

Consider the therapeutic benefits: Every dink shot is an opportunity to release the pent-up frustration of dealing with clients who bring their tax documents in a shoebox. Each serve becomes a symbolic launching of those passive activity loss limitations into the stratosphere. And nothing beats the stress relief of smashing a pickleball after spending hours on hold with the IRS.

Moreover, the social aspect of pickleball provides a much-needed escape from tax isolation. Instead of talking to your office plant about depreciation schedules, you can discuss them with fellow players who will quickly change the subject to literally anything else.

Remember: Tax season is temporary, but pickleball addiction is forever. Besides, the only audit you’ll face on the court is whether your serve was actually out. And unlike tax disputes, those can be settled with a friendly “do-over.”

From its humble beginnings trading for pennies to becoming legal tender in sovereign nations, from pizza purchases that made history to lost fortunes buried in landfills, Bitcoin has already had a journey that rivals the best Hollywood scripts.

Here are some fun facts about everyone’s favorite magical internet money.

Bitcoin factoids

Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s creator, owns around 1 million bitcoins (worth billions of dollars) but has never moved or spent them.¹ The FBI became the holder of (at the time) the largest Bitcoin wallet in the world after seizing 144,000 bitcoins from the Silk Road marketplace in 2013.² However, Satoshi Nakamoto is the largest Bitcoin holder.

There’s a limited number of bitcoins that will ever exist — 21 million. However, due to lost wallets and passwords, the actual number of usable bitcoins is significantly lower. Some estimates suggest up to 20% of all bitcoins are permanently lost.

For example, James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins in 2013.³ He repeatedly tried to get permission to excavate the Welsh landfill where it’s buried, even offering the local council a percentage of the recovered funds.

(Following a hearing, a High Court dismissed Howells’ claim for excavation in January 2025, ruling that it had no prospect of success.)

A few people have had QR codes of their Bitcoin wallet addresses tattooed on their bodies, allowing for quick transactions by scanning their skin.⁴

Bitcoin firsts, a timeline

The first Bitcoin whitepaper was published by Satoshi Nakamoto on October 31, 2008, titled “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” which describes the original plan and protocol for Bitcoin.

The first Bitcoin block (the Genesis block) was mined on January 3, 2009.

The first Bitcoin transaction occurred on January 12, 2009, when Satoshi Nakamoto sent 10 BTC to Hal Finney.

The first Bitcoin exchange, Bitcoin Market, was established in February 2010.

The first real-world Bitcoin transaction was on May 22, 2010 (also known as Bitcoin Pizza Day), when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 BTC for two Papa John’s pizzas (roughly $41 at the time, or $0.0041 per Bitcoin). The Bitcoin Pizza Index tracks how much that purchase would be worth in today’s Bitcoin: https://bitcoinpizzaindex.net/.

The first major company to accept Bitcoin payments was WordPress in November 2012.

The first Bitcoin ATM was installed at Waves Coffee Shop in Vancouver, Canada, on October 29, 2013. The first Bitcoin ATM in Europe was installed in Bratislava, Slovakia in December 2013. The first Bitcoin ATM installed in the United States went online on February 18, 2014, in a cigar bar in Albuquerque, New Mexico, but was removed 30 days later.

The first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender was El Salvador on September 7, 2021.

Tax season has officially kicked off and for many of us that means arriving at the office before the sun rises and leaving long after it sets. Working 12+ hours every day, six or seven days a week for three months straight is a hell of a grind. How do you get through it?

Here’s what works for me:

• Good snacks that change weekly (with a combination of healthy and some not-so-healthy);
• Mixed coffees and teas to break up the monotony of the same hot drinks;
• Keeping a good rice cooker in the kitchen so I can make a hot meal in an office environment;
• Keeping a pillow, blanket, and sleeping pad handy because there will inevitably be a couple of days where I just hit a wall and need to shut my eyes for an hour;
• Putting a weight machine in my spare office for a quick lunch-time workout (although, if I’m being honest, my consistency needs a lot of improvement); and
• Large-screen TV mounted in my office – When I’m alone at the end of the day, I’m kept company by my old friends, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Lately, I’ve had a lot of tension in my neck, so I’m considering a massage chair. It’s depreciable, right?

Send your best tips (and massage chair recommendations if you have them) to mikeg@spidell.com.

Toward the end of 2024, a DOJ release floated across my desk: an individual in Seattle had been sentenced to 10 months in prison for failing to report as much as $6 million in income on his tax returns for 2016 through 2020.¹ Upon closer reading, I discovered this individual owned coffee carts in Seattle. I know Seattle loves its coffee… the world loves Seattle’s coffee.² But $6 million in income from coffee carts? The answer is yes, if they are bikini barista coffee carts, which these were.

Let us set aside the questionable (although apparently profitable) practice of selling coffee in a bikini in the winter in Seattle. The DOJ release also presents readers with a Helpful Comparison so we can wrap our pea brains around the magnitude of this fraud.

Not content to merely note that the coffee cart owner caused a tax loss of around $1.3 million, the prosecuting attorney offered that while the coffee cart owner had enriched himself from sales to his community, he felt “he did not need to pay his share of the costs that support that society. … For example, school lunches are provided by the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service. But for this prosecution, [his] tax fraud would have cost the government the equivalent of 462,000 school lunches.”

Oh, now I get it. Dollars mean nothing to me, but undercooked pizza and tater tots? How dare he.

In case you are still unclear as to what this all means, here are more Helpful Comparisons, using a standard 10 × 8 school lunch tray:³

• To circle the world with school lunch trays, you would need approximately 250 million trays.
• You could fit approximately 300,000 school lunch trays in an acre if stacked perfectly without any space between them.
• If you were to stack up 850,000 Styrofoam lunch trays that New York City schools used to throw away daily, the stack would be 8.5 times taller than the Empire State Building.
• Stacked end-to-end, it would take 2,178.5 school lunch trays to reach the height of the Emerald City’s CN Tower.

Which brings us back to Seattle, and bikini barista coffee carts, and a fraud worth the height of 212 CN Towers in school lunch trays. And he only got 10 months.

Already dreaming about a post-tax season European vacation? If you know you want to get away but can’t decide on the destination, there’s always the usual considerations: museums, architecture, gardens, a restaurant featured on Chef’s Table… beer taxes.

The Tax Foundation created a map of the beer taxes across Europe, with Finland being the highest at €0.597 per 330 mL bottle of beer. You can see the rest at:

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/beer-taxes-europe/