Terrence Howard

[The Observer]

Thanks for linking the audio, Wes.

After listening, we can confirm that Howard did file returns for all of the periods in the judgment and they were not the result of an SFR process. The testimony confirmed that the additional assessments were due to additional tax discovered by the IRS that was not reported by Howard. So I think it is safe to say that Howard was not claiming false credits based on the slavery reparation nonsense.

The testimony of the RO was a bit vague regarding the nature of payments that were made for the 2011 tax year. He stated that Howard appeared to "...be on an installment agreement of some type..." This is an unsatisfactory answer in my opinion given that there should be enough information available to the RO to determine the nature of the payments. Given that installment agreements are supposed to include all periods that are due and that resulting installments are applied to the earliest period, it is unusual that all of the payments were posted to 2011 and not 2010. Secondly, as I have pointed out before, the transcripts will show if the payments were coded as being for an installment agreement approved by the IRS. It appears that the RO never bothered to even do a cursory research as to what these payments were.

My guess is that Howard may have sent in voluntary payments for a period of time, hoping that it would somehow convince the IRS that money coming in would mean they could leave him alone. The RO had testified that Howard had never established any "...level of cooperation..." with the IRS in resolving the debt, which I take it to mean that Howard avoided contact with IRS employees and did not respond back to their attempts to contact him. So it is very unlikely that these payments were the result of an agreement reached with the IRS.

I would have thought that the judge would pursued the line of questioning he initiated in regards to what the IRS would be doing with a judgment if he awarded the relief requested by DOJ. The only point of spending the time, manpower and resources to obtain a judgment is that there is some likelihood of collecting from the taxpayer during the twenty years that the judgment exists. Therefore a AUSA worth their salt is going to grill the assigned IRS employee(s) as whether they have some plan or idea on where they can collect. I didn't get the impression that the attorney or the RO had explored this aspect. If the judge had been more experienced about this type of suit and had drilled down on the RO and AUSA, he might have embarrassed them for not having answers.

Edited to remove a typo.

[wserra]

Every now and then, you will see a judge - given the time and inclination - give an inexperienced lawyer an opportunity to get on his/her feet and do something in a real courtroom in a situation where it's not really necessary. I've seen that a few times in my own cases, once even during an appellate argument. I could be completely wrong, but I got the feeling that this is what was going on here. A default proceeding - so there won't be any cross-examination or argument - is a good opportunity for a judge so inclined to do this.

I also got the impression that neither the AUSA nor the RO was expecting that to happen. In their defense, it is not that common. A typical default hearing takes 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.

[The Observer]

A typical default hearing takes 30 seconds, not 30 minutes.

Yes, it seemed an open-and-shut case. But in the last few years, courts and DOJ have seemed to be looking at IRS suits with a critical eye - all the way to the point that a AUSA may be grilling an RO several times over seemingly mundane issues such as perfection of the assessment(s), verification of final notice delivery to the taxpayer and other critical due process issues. I have no idea if that happened here given the paucity of what actually occurred on the audio . I would like to think that she had at least secured verified 23C documents to establish the validity of the assessments.

I have to agree with your take that maybe the judge was giving this AUSA some courtroom experience. But if Howard had properly lawyered up and his attorney had found some holes in this case, DOJ would have had egg on their face.

[The Observer]

Howard has lawyered up again by filing a suit against his talent agency, CAA, claiming that they did not represent him fairly when negotiating his contract for the television series "Empire."

Howard claims they owe him $120 million and that they had also represented the producers and creators of the series in negotating a package deal, which he claims provided a motive to keep his own salary lower than white actors in other series.

The reason I am posting this is that the revelation that Terrence was receiving $325,000 an episode indicates that he should have had the ability to resolve the tax liability in a reasonable period of time.

[The Observer]

Howard has participated in a podcast with Joe Rogan. Some amazing things were discussed there:

(1) He claimed that he was able to remember being in utero and his birth. "I was about six months, maybe, inside the womb," Howard began..."(a)nd I'm like, 'Okay, don't forget I'm here, don't forget, don't forget, don't forget.' You go to sleep. You wake up again." In reponse to Rogan's question regarding remembering coming out of the birth canal, Howard replied,"I remember being compressed and you want to panic...(b)ut you're flooded with some serotonin and dopamine, to where you feel relaxed and you go right back to sleep."

(2) Howard claimed that at one time he had an interest in a patent for "AV VR" technololgy that somehow was what all subsequent VR tech is based on. But wouldn'y you know it, Terence got side-armed by his agents and shaken down for extra fees, so he abandoned it or forced out of it and now he claims that this patent has earned $7 trillion in licensing fees. Which is pretty amazing since a Google search shows that VR tech is expected to reach less than a half billion in market value by 2030. You gotta wonder if Howard is just making all of this up or would he buy the Brooklyn Bridge if you approached him. I vote for the latter, since Howard claims that everyone profiting from this tech is using it wrong and don't understand it - but he could show them how to use it properly.

(3) Howard decided to explain his understanding of gravity and metaphysics by discussing how to kill it and God with electricity. He uses a lot of pseudophysics language in describing this process:

Earlier in the interview, he claimed 'Gravity is caused by electric force electricity, a claim that, while obliquely true, appeared to not be based in reality.

'Gravity is always seeking a higher pressure condition,' he explained, at one point producing a video from a business partner in which 'linchpins' were used to create 'Saturn without gravity.'

'It spins Northeast [and] is trying to get to the center of an area - the center of a cone,' he continued.

'But the next electric wave is coming so it gets pushed out,' he continued.

'And as it's pushed out... instead of it spinning northeasterly - centripetally - it's forced to spin centrifugally. And it spins southwesterly and it expands itself out.

Then comes 'decay', said - specifically referencing the earth's never-ceasing magnetic field.

That, he said, 'keeps decaying until you get four magnetic waves that hit each other at 120° angles

'At that point they reconvert back into the electric field,' he erroneously declared. And then they make their way back to their Source again - whether it's the star, whatever star it came into.'