Tag: 1040

I've been work­ing on a design project involv­ing income tax, and I'm a big fan of Big Love — so nat­u­ral­ly I won­der how a polyg­a­mist fills out a 1040. My project has giv­en me a good intro­duc­tion into some tech­niques that peo­ple in exot­ic sit­u­a­tions use to avoid get­ting nailed by the IRS, and I won­der which ones are employed by Bill Hen­drick­son, Big Love's plu­ral­ly-mar­ried husband.So, all you tax pro­test­ers out there, tell me how this guy does it … On the sur­face, the Hen­drick­sons are typ­i­cal sub­ur­ban­ites, liv­ing in a sub­di­vi­sion with man­i­cured lawns and white pick­et fences and SUVs, con­tin­u­al­ly weav­ing a pro­tec­tive cloak of lies when it comes to deal­ing with the rest of the world, hid­ing the fact that three seem­ing­ly inde­pen­dent fam­i­lies liv­ing side-by-side are actu­al­ly one large, plu­ral­ly mar­ried fam­i­ly. The hus­band, Bill, owns a Home-Depot-style super-store, so clear­ly he's got some income, in addi­tion to a vari­ety of avenues to shel­ter that income. Each of the three wives lives in her own house. Bill lives with the first wife, Barb, and the oth­er two wives — Nik­ki and Margie — live in the hous­es adja­cent to Bill and Barb. Nik­ki and Margie both work part time, but they clear­ly don't earn enough to cov­er liv­ing expens­es — rent, tak­ing care of the kids, etc. We can assume that Bill owns all three hous­es. Maybe he "rents" hous­es to Nik­ki and Margie for a very reduced rate, and per­haps he also pays them a salary to be babysit­ters, or house clean­ers? Still, you'd think that this sort of sit­u­a­tion would be sus­pi­cious to the IRS, espe­cial­ly since they live in Salt Lake.You'd also think that the Inter­net would have a lot of infor­ma­tion about how polyg­a­mists can avoid income tax­es, but, if it's there, it's not eas­i­ly Google-able. How Stuff Works actu­al­ly has an arti­cle called "How Polygamy Works," which includes this bit:

The eco­nom­ics of polygamy can be hard on the fam­i­lies as well. Col­orado City, Ari­zona, a strict polyg­a­mist enclave, suf­fers from severe pover­ty. The fam­i­lies are sim­ply not able to make enough mon­ey to sup­port all their wives and chil­dren. They rely heav­i­ly on wel­fare, and in some cas­es com­mit wel­fare fraud. The prob­lem is so severe that Col­orado City and sim­i­lar com­mu­ni­ties put a seri­ous strain on state wel­fare systems.

It would be even more sus­pi­cious, I would guess, if they col­lect­ed wel­fare while liv­ing in a fan­cy sub­di­vi­sion. So: Who has some insight here? How do they do it?