You Dont Want To Hear This But...

So, all the way back in 2017 when I first got started into Crypto I had my first big tax bill in 2018. Well, the account we used to pay off the taxes was apparently not accurate and nobody said a word. Rolling forward to 2021, I cashed out my crypto positions and in 2022 the tax man a cometh once again wanting its pound of flesh. My accountant said, “Just pay the bill with the account I have on file as usual?” he asked. “Yeah, thanks.” And it was done. Or so I thought…

Prior to this, my family sold or gave away everything in Cincinnati, OH and got on a plane with some friends as company and moved to Puerto Rico. This coming after Mark Moss had been telling me how amazing it was and connected me to people to handle the Tax setup, the Act 20/60 company, etc. That cost $34,000 to setup.. The aim was that Puerto Rico is the only Tax Haven of the United States. To comply however, you had to setup the company, get it approved, buy a house within 2 years, donate $10k to a local charity, live in Puerto Rico as your Primary Residence (which I discovered later mean live in PR 6 months out of the year and then various places the rest of the year. You can’t do 6 months in PR and 6 months in Florida for example.) and finally, you had to use Puerto Rican banks as your primary banking. I had an issue with that part.

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The long and short of our experience in Puerto Rico was, it wasn’t worth it. I lost a lot of money in all of that. We bought a house, installed a solar system on the house because the power grid infrastructure was so bad that it was causing house fires all over the place and going out constantly, voltage surges etc. When they installed the solar, they completely destroyed the roof of the property which then causes major leakage. The videos and photos I have are horrendus. The damage caused by this was so bad, we had entire floors rising up as though a monster was trying to break through the flooring in multiple areas. The walls were over 80% saturated with water. Nobody would do anything or take accountability. I started suing Windmar, the solar company but the lawyer said I couldn’t repair anything while waiting for DACA to resolve the matter so the damage was getting worse. After 6 months of waiting I finally pulled the plug on the suit and hired a contractor to start repairs. Well that contractor ripped me off for $50,000 and took off to the Dominican. It was problem after problem and finally one day as water was rushing down our stair well like a water fall, our daughter who was a saint about everything came out of her room, looked at the water fall and looked up to me and said “Daddy, can we please move back to the mainland?”. I lost it right there. “Yes, we are leaving”.

I sold the house at a loss, took my licks and moved to Florida. I didn’t even mention how COVID was handled on the island. When we landed in Florida and I saw nobody wearing maskes or demanding “papers” or yelling at eachother about “pull it over your nose!” etc, I got watery eyed. People were free here.

The point of the Puerto Rico story is to show what I went through to try and save money on Taxes, and I left it all behind. We were there long enough, I could have but in my heart I felt like if it was this difficult, something just wasn’t right about it. Maybe thats just a me thing as others seem to fair much better and enjoy the scorching weather, language barrier and the constant scams. I couldn’t take it anymore, especially with my daughter. We did make some awesome friends and the people there once they get to know you aren’t assholes, are so warm and fun and down to Earth.

Fast forward to this year. Our taxes were paid and everything is good. We moved to Tampa for a year to see if we liked it there. We didn’t. While there, we started getting letters talking about how we owed all this money to the IRS. It was saying we now owed over $80,000 more than we had paid going back as far as 2017! We instantly thought this was fake. Then we got another letter, we scanned it and thought, man these scammers need to F off. They were oddly photocoppied, even had a section for paying in BITCOIN! WHAT THE HELL!? Since when did the IRS allow you to pay your tax bill in Bitcoin? TOTALLY Fake! We asked our accountant, he too thought they were fake. There was simply no reason to believe we owed anyone anything.

We were wrong. We had just listed our Tampa property to sell and started getting calls from lawyers asking if we wanted help regarding the Tax Lien put on us. I yelled at the first call cursing him out as a scammer and hung up. The next call heard me out and said “Sir, this is not a scam. You can look this up yourself and call me back if you’d like help.” Low and behold, it was all real!

By the time I looked up everything and confirmed it, I was getting what seemed like a call an hour for lawyers. I finally hired one to get to the bottom of things.

At this point they told me they could get the penalties, interest etc removed and I would just pay the original balance. We had to document a lot of stuff, write explanations as to what happened, etc. I asked the lawyer, so if my tax wasn’t being paid all the way back from 2017, why are we just now hearing about it? They explained the IRS does this on purpose to accrue fees and penalties for more income because they can basically do whatever they want. However, I’ll likely have to pay the full amount they claim is owed, penalties and all and that I will likely get something called an Abatement, which is basically a refund for the difference.

We find a buyer for the Tampa house and I have 6 figures in equity. I’m told that instead of the equity coming to me, it will go directly to the IRS. Not only would we likely have never moved to Tampa at all had we known we had tax issues, but it would have changed our spending habits a great deal. The whole time we had no idea the taxes weren’t paid. Not only are they getting all of the equity from the sale, I had to wire an additional sum this morning to make the entire amount good before the house could even be sold. So in effect, they waited years to tell me there was a problem at all, added penalties and interest the entire time, demand I pay all of it up front before I can pay any of it at all through the sale of the house all while hoping they are decent enough to return the difference, hopefully, some day.

It’s not that I expected a reward for not following through the Puerto Rico situation to cut my taxes to next to nothing, but maybe some consideration? The IRS stacks the deck against you so hard that you have no choice but to suffer thoroughly before hopefully getting any relief at all.

The point to all of this, DONT SCREW UP ON YOUR TAXES. If you stand to make a sum of profit in 2025, make sure you do it under an LLC or corporation, write off your business expenses with your accountants help and then make sure the account number you give them to pay (or just write a check which is probably easier) your due taxes is accurate and then TRIPLE CHECK that the funds came out and stayed out.

I’ve learned that dealing with the IRS is very much like dealing with a mafia with an FU Pay Me mentality. Like a Vampire, if you never give them a reason to enter your life, you shouldn’t get bit. If you do, however, honest mistake or not, prepare to be drained at the door.

Let my pain be a lesson to you all. Dont mess with the IRS. You are nothing to them.

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