It's The Accountability, Stupid!

There are many issues that affect voters this election year. People are concerned about the war in Iraq, the economy, anti/pro choice rights and many other things. What ties them all together is accountability, something we haven't had much of in a long time. I know Congress is finally trying to make some efforts since the Democrats took control but they are still far from perfect. If we had fixed that problem Bush and Cheney would have been impeached and thrown in jail by now. Also, people like A. Blair Stover Jr. and Allen R. Davison would not have had "successful" businesses either.

From The NY Examiner:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (Map, News) - Two Kansas City-area attorneys have been accused of helping their clients avoid millions of dollars in income tax payments through fraudulent tax schemes.[...]

The suits claim both men worked with wealthy clients to avoid most or all of their tax liability by setting up sham corporations based in Nevada. Those corporations would receive payments for bogus management services to the clients' companies, which were then claimed as tax deductions. Other bogus corporations distributed the management fees as stock to the customers' Roth Individual Retirement Accounts, which are not taxable.

One of Stover's clients, the lawsuit alleges, used the Roth IRA scheme for four years and avoided reporting or paying taxes on more than $57.6 million in income, saving the client more than $20 million.

Prosecutors also allege that Davison helped his clients claim deductions tied to operating chicken farms even though one client, who claimed $1.25 million in deductions over three years, told the IRS he had never been a farmer.

And the tale of their antics goes on in the article. Perhaps at some point these two greedy bastards will do some jail time. However, the question will still remain, where is the accountability? These attorneys are just two little peons in the scheme of things (despite being responsible for hundreds of million in lost taxes). The real problem is the way our government has been working not working.

We must hold people like this accountable before the damage is done. We can start that by demanding that the IRS spend its investigative money on the wealthy, instead of the poor and in the middle class. Then after we get these individual tax problems straight, Congress can learn from the example and when they see a President willingly violate the law with abandon, they'll impeach....and convict his unconstitutional ass!