Strip Club Jaunts As Corporate Tax Deductions

Gee, can I take associates to Chippendale's and deduct it from my Schedule C, too?

The Florida Sun-Sentinel:

But how do you feel about a company stacking up all those strip-club expenses and writing them off as business deductions? Open-minded is one thing, but isn't it a little over the top when the average taxpayer is helping underwrite nights out for executives whose idea of hard work is to flirt with the gold-medal winners of surgically enhanced women?

Just think about it: You can cut your tax bill if you buy a lap dance at a strip joint.

"If someone wants to pay $7 a drink to see people without their clothes on, why should we pay for it?" says Robert S. McIntyre, director of the Center for Tax Justice, a Washington-based advocacy group. McIntyre, a man clearly out of touch with the going rate for strip-joint cocktails, says he feels the same way about all corporate deductions for meals and entertainment, which he estimated take about $5 billion off the tax rolls each year.

Because the IRS audits only 20% of corporations with more than $10 million in assets, most of them get away with outrageous expenses like this which are declared as "ordinary and necessary" in conducting their business.

Why don't they get audited more often, you ask? Because big corporations have a huge retinue of lawyers and experts who can fight the IRS for as long as it takes.

One of the ugliest things I heard post Katrina was this phone sex operator who asked Al Franken (long story, but oh the irony) why she must help the victims in New Orleans when they are already squandering her tax money. What's even uglier is she's not alone in this line of thinking.

Yet here are corporate fat cats routinely getting their jollies at our expense and I'm still waiting to hear the outrage.

[hat tip: Raw Story.]

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