• Victor Perez, a 17-year-old non-speaking autistic teen with cerebral palsy who was shot nine times by Idaho police was pronounced clinically brain dead and has been taken off life support. [KTVB7]
• Two underage girls were reportedly propositioned at a Petaluma park on Thursday by a 64-year-old man currently on probation in Sonoma County. [KRON4]
• New photos and video footage have been released of the fatal Cybertruck crash last Thanksgiving in Piedmont. [KRON4]

Image: Alta Plaza Park; Leanne Maxwell/SFist

Businesses and households in all nine Bay Area counties are now classified as “storm victims,” so the IRS and California Franchise Tax Board are cutting us an extra month of slack to blow off filing our taxes.

Is this one of those years when Americans get an extra day or two to do their taxes, because of some holiday that is only observed that day in Washington, D.C.? It is; the holiday is Emancipation Day, April 16, which this year falls on a Sunday, so federal employees are off on Monday, meaning Tax Day for most Americans is not until Tuesday, April 18. But because of the pummeling of storms these last two weeks, the whole Bay Area is getting an even longer extension.

The IRS announced this week that Tax Day is extended until May 15 for those who qualify as “California storm victims” because of the county they live in. Then the next day, the IRS expanded that list of counties so that residents and businesses of all nine Bay Area counties are covered by the deadline extension: San Francisco, Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano, and Sonoma counties.

And for good measure, Governor Gavin Newsom’s office just announced that the California state tax filing deadline has been moved to May 15 as well. Grab a box of Whip-Its and relax, everybody!

"California storm victims now have until May 15, 2023, to file various federal individual and business tax returns and make tax payments," the IRS said in their announcement. "The tax relief postpones various tax filing and payment deadlines that occurred starting on January 8, 2023. As a result, affected individuals and businesses will have until May 15, 2023, to file returns and pay any taxes that were originally due during this period."

The complete list of California counties qualifying for the tax deadline extension is seen above.

You don’t even have to prove any form of hardship, or that you were, in fact, a storm victim in any way. You just have to live in one of the designated counties. “The IRS automatically provides filing and penalty relief to any taxpayer with an IRS address of record located in the disaster area,” the announcement says. “Therefore, taxpayers do not need to contact the agency to get this relief.”

And if you do any maneuvering with retirement accounts or other contributions to limit your tax exposure, you get another month on that too. “This includes 2022 individual income tax returns due on April 18, as well as various 2022 business returns normally due on March 15 and April 18,” the IRS explains. “Among other things, this means that eligible taxpayers will have until May 15 to make 2022 contributions to their IRAs and health savings accounts.”  

Related: 13 Best Tax Planners & Tax Planning Companies [SFist]

Image: kellysikkema via Unsplash

The manner in which some of Facebook's assets were valued by a third-party company was "problematic" according to court documents filed by the IRS: Those assets may have been undervalued by "billions of dollars," the agency claims. Facebook just told its investors the bad news, which arrives weeks after investigators asked a California judge to order Facebook to turn over business records from 2010.

That's the year, the Washington Post recalls, that the social network transferred many of its "intangible" assets — corporate intellectual property not held in the US or Canada — to an Irish Holding Company. Companies in Ireland takes advantage of the country's 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, more favorable than the 35 percent rate in the US. Facebook's tax maneuver put it in good corporate company, and the social network apparently hopes to take its effective tax rate to 27 percent this year (from 40 percent last year). But the way that another party, Ernst & Young, valued the assets is what's being called into question according to Consumerist.

Just last week Facebook beat Wall Street Predictions with its quarterly earning and revenue reports. But if the IRS was determined to be correct, Facebook writes in a filing that the results "could have a material adverse impact on our financial position."

This IRS filing also comes just a week after Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz was loudly calling bullshit on a similar practice by Apple, in which he says that roughly $215 billion of the company's $232 billion in cash is being kept in off-shore accounts, including some in Ireland, and that this amounts to fraud.

Related: Facebook Releases (Low) Diversity Numbers, Adds LGBTQ Stats, Appears To Blame Public School System

By now, you've heard all about the Northern California couple who discovered about $10 million in buried treasure while they were out walking their dog. But before you get too jealous of those guys, you should know that the IRS wants their share of the find this April, and the bill isn't pretty.

As LAist reports, a couple, who media are pseudonymously referring to as "John and Mary" (they don't want their names out there for privacy reasons), were walking their dog on their Sierra Nevada property when they found eight metal cans filled with what turned out to be 1,427 mint-condition gold coins dating from 1847 to 1894.

According to numismatists, the rare coins (which have been dubbed the Saddle Ridge Treasure) could be sold for around $10 million. As the Chron reports today, though, the couple will owe nearly half that in taxes, whether they sell the coins or not.

1969's Cesarini v. United States court case determined that found treasure is considered taxable income the year it's discovered. That decision set the IRS up to say in their tax guide that "If you find and keep property that does not belong to you that has been lost or abandoned (treasure-trove), it is taxable to you at its fair market value in the first year it is your undisputed possession."

Add up the federal tax rate of 39.6 percent and the California rate of 13.3 percent, and you'll see that "John and Mary" probably need to come up with about 47% of the coins' estimated value for the taxmen by April 15. Otherwise, they'll face significant interest and penalties, reports the Chron.

Tiburon coin dealer Don Kagin will be selling the Saddle Ridge Treasure for the couple, placing 90 percent on Amazon's "Collectibles" section, and selling others directly to collectors.

The couple also plans on keeping a few coins for themselves. Kagin tells the Associated Press they'll will use the money generated by the coin sales to pay off bills and to donate to area charities.

[LAist]
[Chron]

During a reported robbery attempt, an Internal Revenue Service special agent shot and wounded a man in Bayview during an attempted mugging. Police spokesman Sgt. Troy Dangerfield told BCN (via CBS 5) that "two suspects approached the agent and attempted a robbery. At some point the agent fired a gun at the suspects, hitting one in the torso...the wounded suspect was taken to a hospital for treatment and is expected to survive." An IRS spokesperson confirms that the agent was on-duty at the time of the shooting.

Apparently Turbo Tax, for the past nine years, has been doing an annual tally of which cities have the largest number of procrastinating citizens when it comes to filing their taxes. San Francisco, which was No. 1 in 2008, was No. 5 in 2009. Houston holds the current No. 1 spot, which they've held for three previous years. New York City has held strong at No. 3 for the past two years. Don't worry, fellow procrastinators, we still have a little over three weeks before the big deadline! [Via Newser]

While we love to poke fun at Mayor Gavin Newsom now and then (which we're sure he finds nothing short of adorable, right?) we can all agree on one thing: at least he's no Ron Dellums. With a lien on the Oakland mayor's property for failing to fork over $239,000 in taxes (from 2005 to 2007) to the Internal Revenue Service, the Dellums are now facing a second lien for more than $13,000. Dellums, and his wife, Cynthia, are "named in an IRS lien filed with the Alameda County recorder's office Dec. 23 in the amount of $13,638," reports SFGate. This comes on the heels of Oakland being... well, being Oakland.

Oh oh. Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums owes the IRS in back taxes. Lots and lots of back taxes.

According to CBS 5, "Alameda County records show the IRS has placed a lien on the couple's property that claims they failed to pay $239,000 in federal income taxes from 2005 to 2007." The lien, it seems, was filed Oct. 14.

"We owe taxes," the Dellums tell the Oakland Tribune. "The issue is being dealt with, and there is a plan that we have laid out, and it will be dealt with as expeditiously as possible. Period."

Dellums earns somewhere around $184,000 a year as mayor.

A new piece today in the Washington Post suggests that Obama administration officials and members of Congress alike are considering the possibility of a VAT, or value-added tax, which would impose a levy on all goods and services in order to cover the nation's gi-fucking-normous budget deficit. Along with raising taxes on the highest earners, the idea of a VAT seems to be gaining traction as something that has worked for 130 other countries worldwide.

Both Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm's brother), who's serving as a health care advisor to the President, and former Fed chair Paul Volcker who's serving as a tax advisor, have allegedly expressed interest in such a tax -- which would add a surcharge onto everything from a pack of gum to a haircut. Some see the tax as one of the only ways out of the hole we're in while also funding Obama's trillion-dollar expansion of health care coverage. Crazy, you say? This tax-despising nation would never stand for it and it unfairly impacts the poor?

President Obama announced a plan this morning to revise IRS policies and to crack down on individuals and corporations using loopholes and off-shore "headquarters" to avoid paying their fair share of taxes. He plans to hire 800 new IRS employees to act as enforcers of the new plan, looking into and auditing corporate books to retrieve more than $200 billion potentially owed to the government. In his quick speech, Obama cited a famous address in the Cayman Islands which is listed as the headquarters for 12,000 different corporate entities. Please cue the requisite Republican shit fit on Fox News and Matt Drudge summoning the horsemen of the apocalypse.

RELATED: Money.com's piece about the richest tax cheats.