Hank Aaron once said, “It took me seventeen years to get 3,000 hits in baseball. It took me one afternoon on the golf course.” Remarkably, millions of Americans still manage to love it. They’ll pick out their loudest pants or skirts, head for the course, fire up their carts, and whack a little white ball across a couple hundred acres of manicured lawn for hours at a time. Remarkably, some of them will consider the whole thing fun. The rest will suffer 18 holes in silent frustration until they hit that one gloriously perfect shot that fools them into thinking maybe, someday, they’ll conquer the game.

Chi Chi Rodriguez said that, “Golf is the most fun you can have without taking your clothes off.” But golf is more than just fun. It’s big business. The National Golf Foundation reports the game generates $102 billion in revenue. That includes money spent at over 14,000 courses, plus billions more on equipment, apparel, instruction, travel to play the game, and golf course homes. There’s even a bipartisan Congressional Gold Caucus made up of members who believe the worst day out on the course beats the best day bickering in the Capitol. Naturally, all that money sloshing around the course means big taxes – and people trying to avoid those taxes.

This week’s story takes us to Springfield, Massachusetts, where Kevin Kennedy used to manage two municipal golf courses: the Franconia Golf Course and Veterans Memorial Golf Course. He earned a base salary of $67,000 per year. His company, Kennedy Golf Management, also earned a portion of the profits from greens fees, cart rentals, and pro shop proceeds. Much of the payments for those items came in the form of cash.

Cash is taxable, of course, no matter how you earn it. But it’s also easy to hide, from employers and the IRS alike. So Kennedy simply scooped it out of the register and hid the income from the city. He wound up paying $160,000 of it, in actual currency, to a luxury homebuilder for custom houses in East Longmeadow and on Cape Cod. When it came time to finance the rest of the East Longmeadow property, he submitted a bogus contract to the bank that understated the purchase price by the $160,000 he had already paid in cash. (Talk about “improving your lie”!)

Naturally, when April 15 rolled around, Kennedy left that cash off his IRS scorecard. Maybe he thought he was playing winter rules?

In 2016, IRS agents showed up at Kennedy’s shop. They weren’t looking for pants with little whales on them. Three years later, prosecutors charged him with theft concerning a program receiving federal funds, money laundering, filing false tax returns, and making a false statement to a financial institution. Just before trial, he plead guilty to the tax charges. In total, he underreported his income by over $1,000,000, costing Uncle Sam over $300,000 in tax. Last week, Judge Mark Mastroianni sentenced Kennedy to spend 13 months learning the difference between a “country club” and a “country club prison.” There may be room in the exercise yard to work on his short game. (So he’s got that going for him, which is nice.) However, you can bet Kennedy is wishing he could take a mulligan on a few of his choices right around now.

Gary Player once said, “The more I work and practice, the luckier I seem to get.” The same holds true for taxes. We work and practice learning legitimate strategies to help you pay less, that don’t involve filching cash from the register, lying to your business partners, or defrauding your mortgage company. So call us for a tee time and see how much you can save!