Don't Mess With Taxes

Two attorneys have come up with what is probably the first tax comic book.

Get Smart (About Special Manufacturing Deductions) is the creation of Jeffrey M. Tolin, tax principal and  senior tax advisor for the entertainment industry at Ernst & Young, and Michael H. Salama, vice president for tax administration and senior tax counsel with the Walt Disney Company.

At the Web page for Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, where Tolin is an adjunct professor in the school's Tax LLM program, the graphic novel is described as a parody of the classic television show Get Smart.

It blends, say the authors, humor with a substantive tax overview of Internal Revenue Code section 199, which contains special rules, also known as the domestic production deduction, for the film and television industries.

The Loyola site elaborates on Sec. 199:

It was enacted as an incentive to create U.S. jobs and U.S. based production. It provides a special deduction for domestic production activities. The deduction, unlike section 181 which was enacted specifically to combat "runaway film production," is particularly significant since it provides a permanent financial statement benefit in the form of effective tax rate reduction.

You can digitally thumb through the tax comic by clicking on the image on this Web page, which also has details in case you want to buy your own dead-tree copy. Or you can download a copy of the graphic novel here.

And I hope Tolin and Salama have booked their trips to the next Comic-Con event!