Move over wesley snipes. The Internal Revenue Service is suing Oscar-winning actor Nicholas Cage for using a Los Angeles-based company he owns "to wrongly write off 3.3 million dollars in personal expenses, " according to Forbes.
Cage's accountants must have been very creative as the expenses included limos, meals, gifts, travel and his Gulfstream 1159A turbojet. Certainly, they would have been to deal with some extraordinary ups and downs in his income. According to Forbes, he reported just $430,000 in taxable income in 2003, but the following year, when he starred in National Treasure, he listed taxable income of $17 million. Still, Forbes reports that Cage's business manager, Samuel J. Levin, told the magazine in an email that the expenses were proper as "customary in the entertainment industry" and were partly based on the actor's "security needs."
This from a man who has properties all over the world, including Midford Castle near Bath, which he bought last year for nearly £5 million ($US9.8 million), the $15.7 million Gray Craig estate in Rhode Island and a 40-acre island in Bahamas which was on the market for $3 million.
Indeed, as Joe Kristan writes in the taxupdate blog, only little people pay taxes on their Gulfstreams. The New York Post cheekily poses the obvious question: has Cage been taking advice from Wesley Snipes.
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