The famous Amos incident

The income tax treatment of damages is a lot looser than it ought to be. You would think that when a claimant or plaintiff recovers money from a bad guy on a claim or lawsuit, the tax consequences would be clear. But often they are not.

One notorious case on this subject involves a tawdry incident that took place on a professional basketball court in front of a worldwide audience. The taxpayer was a photographer named Eugene Amos, who had an unpleasant interaction in Minneapolis with a fellow named Dennis Rodman. Yes, that Dennis Rodman. Amos got six figures from Rodman to shut up. Was it taxable income? The judge in the tax case wound up splitting the baby between Amos and the IRS.

Anyway, more than you ever wanted to see in connection with the events in question can be found here:

First-in, still-here

Hard to believe that it's been six years since I last posted on this blog. I'm still teaching an introductory Income Tax course to law students, but I've also been doing a lot of professional writing that has limited my blogging time. And there was a sabbatical in there – spent stuck in my home office as the pandemic raged on.

During the intervening years, I've switched the casebook that I use in the course, and as a result, a fair number of the cases that used to be central to my spiel have been swept into the dustbin of tax history. I suppose I'll always be reliving Duberstein and Benaglia, for example, but Drescher and LoBue, the people, are now out of the picture that the students are getting from me.

There's always some tax story to follow up on, though, and I hope to resume doing some of that over the next few months here. (Photo: Markus Winkler.)