All Articles Tagged "international travel"
Report Recommends Denying Passports to Tax Evaders
(MarketWatch) — About 1% or 224,000 of the 16 million passports issued in fiscal year 2008 went to people who owed more than a total of $5.8 billion on their taxes. And that’s counting only taxpayers who reported what they owed or those whom the IRS caught through an audit. The figure doesn’t include people who never filed a tax return or who understated what they owed, according to the GAO report. Some taxpayers who received passports that year “accumulated substantial wealth and assets, including million-dollar houses and luxury vehicles, while failing to pay their federal taxes,” according to the GAO, which conducted the study of U.S. State Department, IRS and other data at the behest of the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. Read the report on the GAO site. One passport recipient is a World Bank employee who owes $300,000 to the IRS. Another is a gambler who owes $46.6 million in unpaid taxes and who “gambled tens of millions of dollars at the same time the income taxes were not paid,” according to the report.
Ms. Jackson Prepping for History-Making Paris Performance
Janet Jackson will make history this summer in France. On June 14, the singing/dancing beauty will be the first female pop artist to perform inside of the Louvre’s famous glass pyramid. Wouldn’t it be nice if your man surprised you with a trip to Paris AND got tickets to the JJ concert? Hmmm…
Head over to Hello Beautiful to find out what Ms. Jackson has to say about this unique honor!
Have you ever taken in a concert when you travel abroad?
Tips for Traveling on the Cheap
(New York Times) — No matter where your comfort zone lies, though, to be a successful frugal traveler you may have to shed your preconceived notions surrounding six areas. Once you do so, the rewards of seeing the world exceed the inconvenience of going without a plush terry-cloth robe. The degree to which you feel at ease around strangers from both strange and utterly normal lands is a major factor that determines your frugal journey. How willing are you to share a dorm room, say, with a helicopter pilot in training in Lafayette, La.? (I was, and wish we were still in touch.) Can you tolerate a thin-walled room in a guest house with a next door neighbor who coughs all night, as recently happened to me in London? No? O.K., then, settle into your hotel. But you’ll have to make up for it by traveling via bus rather than rental cars, or subway over taxi, or eating at the counter at a place like Guerrin in Buenos Aires, where that’ll get you 30 percent off on your slices compared to table service. Lack of privacy can be intolerable, even for me, as when a young guy with a teeth-grinding issue moved into my hostel dorm room in Los Angeles. The sound from his bed was so piercingly rhythmically torturous it was as if a cricket was chirping inside my pillowcase.
The Hazards of Using Cards Abroad
(Wall Street Journal) — As if the full-body scans weren’t annoying enough, travelers now face higher transaction fees and more-aggressive fraud detection systems when they use their credit and debit cards abroad. After he was unable to use his debit card, Bart Narter, a senior vice president at financial-services consulting firm Celent, now travels with two, in case one of them is locked up by a fraud-detection system. “There’s an increased chance that transactions are going to get flagged” in foreign countries, he says.
