ProPublica: Sports Team Owners Face New Tax Scrutiny From The IRS

ProPublica, Sports Team Owners Face New Scrutiny From IRS Over Tax Avoidance:

The IRS has launched a campaign to examine whether wealthy taxpayers are violating the law when using their ownership of sports teams to save large amounts in taxes.

The effort will focus on sports industry entities that are reporting “significant tax losses” to “determine if the income and deductions driving the losses” are lawful, according to the IRS announcement earlier this year. That announcement, which consisted of one sentence on a webpage devoted to compliance campaigns by the IRS division that focuses on large businesses, did not specify what kinds of abuses the agency will be looking for.

The initiative comes after ProPublica, drawing on leaked IRS data, revealed how billionaire team owners frequently report incomes for their teams that are vastly lower than their real-world earnings.

When someone buys a business, they’re often able to deduct almost the entire sale price against their income during the ensuing years. That allows them to pay less in taxes. The underlying logic is that the purchase price was composed of assets — buildings, equipment, patents and more — that degrade over time and should be counted as expenses. Owners of sports franchises routinely avail themselves of such deductions, which can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But in few industries is that tax treatment more detached from economic reality than in professional sports. Teams’ most valuable assets, such as TV deals and player contracts, are virtually guaranteed to regenerate because sports franchises are essentially monopolies. There’s little risk that players will stop playing for their teams or that TV stations will stop airing their games. But the team owners still get to deduct the value of those assets over time, sometimes billions of dollars’ worth, from their taxable income.

It helps billionaire sports team owners pay far lower income tax rates than the athletes they employ or even the low-wage workers who sell food or clean their stadiums.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• ProPublica: America's Richest People Pay Little To Nothing In Federal Income Taxes (June 8, 2021)
• ProPublica: How Peter Thiel Turned $2,000 In A Roth IRA Into $5,000,000,000 (June 28, 2021)
• ProPublica: Why You Can’t Turn Your Roth IRA Into a Billion-Dollar Tax Shelter (July 1, 2021)
• ProPublica: The Billionaire Playbook — How Sports Owners Use Their Teams To Avoid Millions In Taxes (July 12, 2021)
• ProPublica: The Number Of People With IRAs Worth $5 Million Or More Has Tripled, Congress Says (July 29, 2021)
• ProPublica: Secret IRS Files Reveal How Much the Ultrawealthy Gained by Shaping Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Tax Cut” (Aug. 11, 2021)
• ProPublica: How The Trump Tax Law Created A Loophole That Lets Top Executives Net Millions By Slashing Their Own Salaries (Aug. 20, 2021)
• ProPublica: House Bill Would Blow Up The Massive IRAs Of The Superwealthy (Sept. 22, 2021)
• ProPublica: More Than Half Of America’s 100 Richest People Exploit GRATs To Avoid Estate Taxes (Sept. 30, 2021)
• ProPublica: 18 Billionaires Received Taxpayer-Funded Stimulus Checks During The Pandemic (Nov. 4, 2021)
• ProPublica: How These Ultrawealthy Politicians Avoided Paying Taxes (Nov. 5, 2021)
• ProPublica: More Billionaire Tax Games (Dec. 9, 2021)
• ProPublica: How Three Families Shielded Their Fortunes From Taxes For Generations (Dec. 15, 2021)
• Wall Street Journal Editorial, The Internal Revenue Leak Service (Dec. 15, 2021)
• ProPublica: When Billionaires Don’t Pay Taxes, People 'Lose Faith In Democracy' (Mar. 4, 2022)
• ProPublica Names The 15 Americans Who Reported The Most Income And Reveals Data For The Top 400 (Apr. 14, 2022)
• ProPublica: If You’re Getting A W-2, You’re A Sucker (Apr. 19, 2022)
• ProPublica: The Tax Scam That Won’t Die (June 22, 2022)
• ProPublica: The Billionaire GOP Mega-Donor Who’s Gaming The Tax System (June 22, 2022)
• ProPublica: Ten Ways Billionaires Avoid Taxes On An Epic Scale (June 27, 2022)
• Wall Street Journal Editorial, Comey|McCabe IRS Audits AND ProPublica Tax Leak Should Be Investigated (July 8, 2022)
• Wall Street Journal, Citadel’s Ken Griffin Sues IRS Over Leak Of Tax Return Info To ProPublica (Dec. 15, 2022)
• ProPublica: How The Wealthy Save Billions In Taxes By Skirting Wash Sale Rules (Feb. 13, 2023)
• ProPublica: Wealthy Executives Make Millions Trading Competitors’ Stock With Remarkable Timing (Mar. 18, 2023)
• Hedge Fund Billionaire Ken Griffin Subpoenas ProPublica Over Unlawful Disclosure Of His Tax Returns (Sept. 19, 2023)