The Dark Knight vs. H&R Block

The Dark Knight visits H&R Bruce Wayne (aka Batman) may be out to get Block (H & R), not the villainous Bain. Seems like H&R did a tax return comparison between the wealthy Mr. Wayne and a competing super-hero and made a 17- million- dollar mistake on his tax projection.

In the first calculation (now pulled from their website) Block had Bruce Wayne reducing his taxes to zero by huge donations to charity. There’s only one problem with this – it doesn’t work now, and it never has. The tax code limits the charitable deduction to 50% of page one income (Adjusted Gross Income or AGI for short).

When a CPA blogger pointed this out, Block redid the calculation; and suddenly Mr. Wayne’s tax liability changed from zero to $17,000,000. Oops!

I suspect that this is yet another attempt to make a case on how little the “rich” pay in taxes.
We’ve disproved this with IRS- provided facts in our blog posts and a follow up post for those doubting Thomases.

You might draw some conclusions about who should be preparing your taxes based on the first draft done for Bruce Wayne and the final (corrected) version.

Here’s the data in graphic form:

The first comparison
The final result

Here’s the erroneous first version-

First version with tax error

Here’s the corrected version- (turns out that the rich pay much more than their “fair share.”)

Corrected tax calculation

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David Conley

David is a partner at Smith, Conley & Associates, PC. In addition to writing and tax consulting, he is active in the pro-life community serving as President of the Fayette County Right to Life chapter of Georgia Right to Life.
He is also a founding Board Member and Finance Director of the Fayette Pregnancy Resource Center and serves on the Board of the National Equal Rights Institute.