3 ms·

1. Thiel was not rich when he did this. He was 32 with $2K tucked away in a Roth, maybe more in a standard IRA. 2. What he did was in no way illegal. He did no

by fny 5y ago

1. Thiel was not rich when he did this. He was 32 with $2K tucked away in a Roth, maybe more in a standard IRA. 2. What he did was in no way illegal. He did not cheat the system. The IRS would have come down on him with a hammer already, and they haven't managed to figure out how to do it for the last decade.

s1artibartfast 5y ago
1. Thiel was not Mega rich, but he had money, he had worked as a lawer for a few years and managed his own venture capital firm. Either way, this is irrelevant as he met the income requirements to contribute to an IRA. 2. It very well may have been illegal, as mentioned in the top level post. The purchase price was the legal value, but using an IRA as a vehicle to invest in your own company appears be prohibited by IRA regulations. At the time, it was a purchase <$2000, and may not have been reviewed. If paypal was someone else's company, there would be no legal issue.
- Taniwha 5y ago
  essentially it seems that his venture capital firm IS his Roth IRA - and it was making the investments - definitely not hands off
ABCLAW 5y ago
>The IRS would have come down on him with a hammer already Part of my work is in financial investigations. The finances of large, multi-entity organizations are expensive to create, difficult to parse, and require extensive periods of time of trained, expensive staff to understand. Assuming that 'things would have been caught' flies in the face of the fact that they almost never are. Accounting rules change frequently, software systems for logging information is changed, and records are lost. Emails have to be read in tandem with entries to understand the intentions. Even in cases where we have confessions that someone has embezzled money, we often need to spend multiple weeks tracking down records to isolate when/where/how it occurred. Even during audits, requests for records can be baked. 'Random' samples of given entries can just exclude the questionable ones. I've appeared in front of federal tax courts in my practice, the game isn't fair - don't base your reasoning on the idea that it must be.
- abra0 5y ago
  Sorry, what does "bake a request for records" mean?

by fny 5y ago

s1artibartfast 5y ago

1. Thiel was not Mega rich, but he had money, he had worked as a lawer for a few years and managed his own venture capital firm. Either way, this is irrelevant as he met the income requirements to contribute to an IRA. 2. It very well may have been illegal, as mentioned in the top level post. The purchase price was the legal value, but using an IRA as a vehicle to invest in your own company appears be prohibited by IRA regulations. At the time, it was a purchase <$2000, and may not have been reviewed. If paypal was someone else's company, there would be no legal issue.

Taniwha 5y ago
essentially it seems that his venture capital firm IS his Roth IRA - and it was making the investments - definitely not hands off

ABCLAW 5y ago

>The IRS would have come down on him with a hammer already Part of my work is in financial investigations. The finances of large, multi-entity organizations are expensive to create, difficult to parse, and require extensive periods of time of trained, expensive staff to understand. Assuming that 'things would have been caught' flies in the face of the fact that they almost never are. Accounting rules change frequently, software systems for logging information is changed, and records are lost. Emails have to be read in tandem with entries to understand the intentions. Even in cases where we have confessions that someone has embezzled money, we often need to spend multiple weeks tracking down records to isolate when/where/how it occurred. Even during audits, requests for records can be baked. 'Random' samples of given entries can just exclude the questionable ones. I've appeared in front of federal tax courts in my practice, the game isn't fair - don't base your reasoning on the idea that it must be.

abra0 5y ago
Sorry, what does "bake a request for records" mean?