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September 30, 2005 

                      FLORIDA MINIMUM WAGE RAISE IN ANNUAL CALCULATION ANNOUNCED

TALLAHASSEE - The Agency for Workforce Innovation announced today that Florida’s minimum wage will be $6.40 per hour effective January 1, 2006 for all hours worked in Florida. This represents an increase of 25 cents over the current state minimum wage of $6.15 per hour. Florida’s minimum wage was created in a constitutional amendment approved by voters on November 2, 2004, and covers all employees in the state covered by the federal minimum wage.

 Pursuant to the language of the state constitutional amendment, the Agency for Workforce Innovation is to perform an annual calculation to establish a new minimum wage each year. The constitution also requires the adjusted minimum wage to be published. The increase in the minimum wage this year represents a 4 percent change in the federal consumer price index for urban wage earners and clerical workers in the South Region for the 12-month period prior to September 1, 2005. Florida’s new minimum wage will be $1.25 more than the current $5.15 federal minimum wage.

Employers must pay their employees a wage not less than the amount of the hourly state minimum wage for all hours worked in Florida. The definitions of “employer,” “employee,” and “wage” for state purposes are the same as those established under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA).

For “tipped employees” meeting eligibility requirements for the tip credit under the FLSA, employers may count tips actually received as wages under the FLSA, but the employer must pay “tipped employees” a direct wage in an amount equal to the minimum wage of $6.40 minus $3.02 (which, as required by Florida’s Constitution, is the 2003 tip credit existing under the FLSA), or a direct hourly wage of $3.38 on January 1, 2006.

Employees who are not paid the minimum wage may bring a civil action in a court of competent jurisdiction against the employer or any person violating Florida’s minimum wage law. The state attorney general may also bring an enforcement action to enforce the minimum wage. As stated in Florida’s Constitution, the case law, administrative interpretations, and other guiding standards under the FLSA should be the guide regarding the construction of Florida’s constitutional amendment creating the minimum wage. FLSA information and compliance assistance can be found at http://www.dol.gov/dol/compliance/comp-flsa.htm. Agency for Workforce Innovation

The Caldwell Building •107 East Madison Street, MSC Area 100E•Tallahassee, Florida•32399-4120

Telephone (850) 245-7105•Fax (850) 921-3223•TTY/TDD 1-800-955-8771-Voice1-800-955-8770

$300 billion void

By GENE MEYER

The Kansas City Star

Sunday, November 13, 2005

Enough good cop already.

Internal Revenue Service auditors are ratcheting up more enforcement machinery to snare more than $300 billion annually in taxes that Americans owe but aren’t paying, IRS Commissioner Mark Everson reports.

Focusing on individual taxpayers whose incomes topped $100,000 and corporations with assets topping $10 million helped the IRS collect a record $47.3 billion in unpaid taxes in the year that ended Sept. 30, Everson reported earlier this month. Now auditors plan to look more closely at sole proprietors, small partnerships and subchapter S corporations, he said.

Auditing and other enforcement activities at the IRS nosedived in the late 1990s, particularly after witnesses at Senate Finance Committee hearings in 1997 and 1998 painted lurid pictures of harrowing abuses of honest taxpayers’ rights. New legislation and a Taxpayers Bill of Rights soon followed.

Some worried the new rules went beyond protecting honest taxpayers and tilted the enforcement balance in cheaters’ favor. Revenues from the audits and other enforcement actions dropped more than $5 billion between 1996 and 1999, bounced once, then twitched by less than $300 million annually until beginning another climb in 2003.

Wimpy enforcement revenues weren’t the IRS’s biggest concern, though.

The IRS basically counts on taxpayers to calculate their own taxes honestly, with some basic checks, balances and potential penalties thrown in to discourage any temptation to cheat.

So when enforcement slumped, the service worried that honest taxpayers would see others successfully ducking their fair share of taxes. And if honest taxpayers turned cynical, the IRS feared the whole honor system would be in trouble.

“We want to be sure that fairness resonates through the system,” Everson said.

The Internal Revenue Service won a couple of signal enforcement victories recently, with the conviction of longtime tax resister Irwin Schiff and the sentencing of the last of the 10 defendants in the Anderson's Ark & Associates case.

Schiff, who has fought the IRS in court for years, arguing that there is no legal obligation to pay taxes, owned Freedom Books, which sold books, tapes and packets encouraging customers not to pay income tax. Last month, a federal jury in Las Vegas convicted him of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false returns filed by others, of conspiring to defraud the United States, and of income-tax evasion and filing false income tax returns for the years 1997 through 2002.

This was the third time Schiff has been convicted of tax offenses, the Justice Department said.

He faces a maximum sentence of 43 years in prison and $3.25 million in fines, the department said.

Earlier, a federal judge in Seattle sentenced Gary Kuzel, a certified public accountant from Downers Grove, Ill., to 24 months in prison for his role in Anderson's Ark, an organization that sold fraudulent tax shelters and investment scams to taxpayers. From 1996 through 2001, AAA had about 1,500 clients, nearly 300 of whom reported more than $120 million in fraudulent income-tax deductions, according to the government.
 

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