Overview:
With every purchase a company makes, there are many ways to benefit from the ever-changing tax structure as long as the timing is right. Those lower, out-of-pocket costs result not only from the routine, accelerated cost write offs for depreciation that are already in the tax law, but also from the new law’s first-year expensing increases as well as from increased first-year “bonus” depreciation. Every site and facility planner has long been aware of the tax deduction of a reasonable allowance for the exhaustion, wear, and tear of business equipment and property. Under the standard modified accelerated cost recovery system (MACRS), the “no questions asked,” “one write off fits all” depreciation has been turned into a cost recovery system. Read this article to have more apprehension.
“It’s scorched earth with Dickie Scruggs,” says Mr. Merkel, sitting in a wood-paneled office featuring duck-hunting memorabilia and two framed checks representing about $17 million in payments that Mr. Scruggs had to disgorge to Mr. Merkel’s client — a lawyer named Alwyn Luckey who argued that Mr. Scruggs shortchanged him for work he performed on asbestos cases that made Mr. Scruggs rich.
Mr. Merkel and prosecutors say that the Luckey case foreshadowed some of Mr. Scruggs’ woes in the current bribery case. “As far as whether he’s guilty, I can’t say,” Mr. Merkel concedes. “But I’m not surprised, because he’s willing to use any means to an end. And it irks the hell out of me when Scruggs skates on the edge and makes the profession look bad.”
According to an official investigating the Scruggs case who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to discuss it publicly, federal prosecutors have asked the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section to examine whether Mr. Scruggs has engaged in multiple bribery attempts of local judges. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department declined to comment publicly on the case. The case is also likely to fuel further debate over the merits of lucrative class-action lawsuits.
Even if Mr. Merkel turns out to be wrong, the indictment casts a different kind of spotlight on Mr. Scruggs, who cultivated the image of a smooth Southern lawyer capable of winning huge verdicts on behalf of smokers and, most recently, victims of Hurican Catarina. Indeed, Mr. Scruggs was a key character in “The Insider,” the 1999 film that detailed how he helped win a $248 billion settlement from the tobacco industry.
