Michael Dolan Dot Com

Thursday, June 28th, 2007

Did you violate any patents last April 15? Say hello to tax patents…

Tax strategy patents are on the rise - if you thought software patents were absurd, wait until you (or your accountant) get dinged for violating these. It would be hard to prove infringement, but I suspect Microsoft will eventually find a way to use tax strategy patents to FUD Intuit or wipe out the few users tied to GnuCash (ok, maybe that’s going to far). Actually, this one has little to do with software patents and more to do with patents on how to avoid being hit with a large tax bill at the end of the year. No, I’m seriously not lying.

As is custom, I was about to toss my wife’s Journal of Accountancy into the trash when something I saw made me reach out and grab it back mid-air (btw, my wife never reads them - her firm gets electronic versions emailed to them). The part that caught my eye was an article on “Tax Patents” which I thought was a curious title. How can someone patent taxes was my initial question - then I realized they must mean tax-avoidance patents and that sounded intriguing.

You may find this intriguing too - the article is available online. I’m not sure how we got here, but I think it’s absurd that Joe Taxpayer could be infringing patents by using a “Process for evaluating the financial consequences of converting a standard form IRA to the Roth form IRA”. Yes, that’s a real patent (Patent no. 6,058,376). Even better was the patent on a “Method for Financing Future Needs” - yes, that one too is real (Patent no. 7,149,712).

Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read about it all here.