| Volume 90 Number 4 |
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Texas Consumer Complaint Center
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Your Guide to Small Claims Court
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1-713-743-2168
The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
You can file a small claims case in justice court for up to $10,000. You don't even need an attorney!
Next time you have a dispute, consider filing a small claims case. Once the other side knows you plan to assert your legal rights, it may be easier to resolve the dispute.
For more general information about the law, check out my website.
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Credit - Chargebacks v. Forgiven Debt
If you are scammed out of money and your credit card company authorizes a chargeback, it's the end of the story, right? Not so fast!
What seems like an open and shut case may actually be a little more complex.
For some background, if you owe a real debt to your credit card company and the creditor forgives the debt, you will owe taxes on the amount forgiven. For example, if you make $50,000 a year and have a $10,000 debt forgiven that year, you must pay taxes as if you made $60,000 that year.
It would make sense, however, that a chargeback wouldn't be treated as a forgiven debt. After-all, this is a "protection" that many credit card companies afford consumers for using their services. According to reports, that's not what's happening. Two years ago, a consumer was scammed into a nearly $5,000 "travel club." Now, some two years later, the company has been found guilty and yet the consumer is being asked to pay taxes on the chargeback.
Could this happen to you? Could you owe money to the IRS after you've been scammed?
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Taxpayer Guide to the Affordable Care Act
With the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the IRS will be taking on some additional work. That's because the new healthcare law adds or amends more than 40 parts of the tax code. Although individuals and businesses will face new taxes and tax breaks, parts of the law will be implemented each year through 2018. As a result, many will need help navigating the tax implications of the new health care law.
Check out this guide!
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Your Money
How fast will your retirement savings grow?
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For the Lawyers
Seventh Circuit allows class action with individual damages, rejecting strict reading of Comcast Corp. v. Behrend.
The Seventh Circuit rejected the notion that a class action cannot proceed if there might be individualized damages. The court stated:
It would drive a stake through the heart of the class action device, in cases in which damages were sought rather than an injunction or a declaratory judgment, to require that every member of the class have identical damages. If the issues of liability are genuinely common issues, and the damages of individual class members can be readily determined in individual hearings, in settlement negotiations, or by creation of subclasses, the fact that damages are not identical across all class members should not preclude class certification. Otherwise defendants would be able to escape liability for tortious harms of enormous aggregate magnitude but so widely distributed as not to be remediable in individual suits.
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