​Here’s an item about the different types of vehicle titles.  If you ever have occasion to be involved in a used car transaction with a private party, it’s useful information.
If you want to know the different methods for transferring a vehicle title in Arizona, particularly as a gift or when the owner dies, read my newsletter on the subject.  

​I just finished an online course from Pima College.  It never occurred to me that I could pay someone to take the entire course for me.  
Now that I know that such “services” exist, I can see why.  I could pay someone to do all the course work, and give them my login info.  To catch me, the college would have to have a way to verify that it’s me sitting at the computer completing the assignments and taking the tests.  I suppose that’s possible, but I don’t think they do it.  
As the author of the linked item points out, what’s to stop a student from paying someone else to complete an entire degree’s worth of courses if they’re all offered online?
If I had paid someone to take the course for me, on the other hand, I wouldn’t have learned how to use accounting software (the title of the course is computerized accounting).  Since learning how to do something, not just getting academic credits, was my goal, cheating would have been pointless.  Maybe that’s why it didn’t occur to me that cheating would have been so easy.  
A degree acquired by cheating might get someone a job, but if the job actually requires the skills acquired through the coursework, how long is it going to be before the employer figures out that the employee doesn’t have the skills?

If you call a police officer, or anyone else, a vulgar name (but don’t do anything else), are you guilty of disorderly conduct, or, alternatively, disturbing the peace?
This is really not a close call under First Amendment law.  Calling a police officer a vulgar name may be impolite and dumb, but is not disorderly conduct, nor is it disturbing the peace.  A magistrate in Massachusetts only got it half right, but other authorities prevailed on the half that the magistrate got wrong. 

I’m not planning on traveling to Singapore, but if I was, you bet I’d be ready to ride in one of the prototype self-driving cabs that are now operating there.  

What is the “sharing economy?”  It’s Airbnb, Uber, and similar enterprises that make it possible for individuals to provide services to other individuals across a common platform.  I became aware of how widely these platforms are used only recently, when I was meeting with a client who provides services through one of them.  Until he turned it off, his phone didn’t stop buzzing the entire time that we were meeting.
The IRS has launched a special section of its irs.gov web site to provide information to participants in these enterprises.  If you are involved, you may want to check it out.  It’s located at: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/sharing-economy-tax-center
I learned about it from this post on the TaxProf Blog.

It’s been a while since I posted anything about self-driving cars.  The latest news is the bold pronouncement by Ford that it will have fleets of totally autonomous cars, that is, cars that won’t have steering wheels or pedals because those components will be unnecessary, by 2021.  
It might seem impossible, but I don’t think Ford would be making that announcement without there being a reasonable chance that it will be proven true.

​My Tax Law Special Report for August has been posted in the publications section at deconcinimcdonald.com.  It’s about tax-exempt savings vehicles, and focuses on a new proposal for universal savings accounts (USAs).  USAs would be essentially similar to Coverdell ESAs (education savings accounts), but without the limitations on the purposes for which withdrawals may be used.  It’s not an ideal proposal, and it won’t help with tax simplification, but it’s a step in the right direction for people who want to save.  

How do you get ready for a meeting with your lawyer to prepare your estate plan?
I like to make lists. Here’s a list, in order of importance, of things to find out and think about before you meet with your lawyer:
1.Choose (at least tentatively) who will make decisions concerning you and yours (and have a backup decision maker in mind);
2.Find out what you have that already has beneficiaries named and who those beneficiaries are;
3.If you have assets with other people named on them, find out what rights the others have;
4.Have some idea of how you want your estate distributed;
5.Have full names of family members, full names and address of non-family members, and dates of birth for individuals under 18 who are to be named in your estate plan.
This list isn’t necessarily exhaustive, but those are the primary considerations. There is probably some room for disagreement on the order of importance, but when you look at it from the perspective of organizing your affairs, I think you’ll agree the order is pretty accurate.
For more information, check out my Estate Planning Law Reports.  

My Tax Law Special Report for August has been posted in the publications section at deconcinimcdonald.com.  It’s about tax-exempt savings vehicles, and focuses on a new proposal for universal savings accounts (USAs).  USAs would be essentially similar to Coverdell ESAs (education savings accounts), but without the limitations on the purposes for which withdrawals may be used.  It’s not an ideal proposal, and it won’t help with tax simplification, but it’s a step in the right direction for people who want to save.  

​When I was reading the alert published yesterday by the IRS on the latest telephone scam, it occurred to me that the extreme tax complexity that has been created over the last several decades is at least partly to blame for the proliferation of these scams.  I mean, come on, forty years ago, or even twenty years ago, how many people would have been fooled by a telephone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS and demanding immediate payment of the “federal student tax?”  
Today, however, people who don’t know much about taxes, but who have a vague awareness that there are taxes connected with education (i.e. tuition tax credits and the like) might be fooled into thinking there is a “federal student tax” when confronted with an aggressive thief claiming that they are calling from the IRS and demanding immediate payment.  
The ease with which payments can be delivered over the telephone or by electronic means is also certainly a contributor to the prevalence of payment scams.  In the olden days, you had to mail a check (or deliver cash or go to the Western Union office) to make a payment.  That meant that after you told the telephone caller that you would send money, you had time to think about it while you were writing the check, and while you were on your way to the post office to mail the check.  In that time you had a chance to realize, after the initial fright wore off, that the call didn’t sound right.  You might talk to someone or try to get more information yourself before you dropped that check in the mail, and conclude that there is no “federal student tax,” or that even if there is, you wouldn’t be finding out through a strange telephone call that you owe it.  
Take the IRS’ advice: “If you get a suspicious phone call from someone claiming to be from the IRS and asking for money… [d]o not give out any information.  Hang up immediately.”  Or if you want my advice, replace “suspicious” with “unsolicited” and delete “claiming to be from the IRS,” so the advice is: "If you get an unsolicited phone call from someone asking for money, do not give out any information.  Hang up immediately.”