Taxman
Blowing the Whistle
Von Hapsburgs's Return
Libraries Not Dead
Museum Learning

Stephen Greene wrote a timely article about how changes in federal tax laws affect the tax exemption status of graduate students with fellowships and assistantships (October 19, 1987, p. 1). However, he did not mention current Internal Revenue Service efforts to collect back taxes from former or current graduate students who held research assitantships during the years before the tax law changes came into effect.

The IRS contacted me in July 1986 and ordered me to pay taxes on income from a research assitantship I held when I was a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts in 1983. The agency argued that because the funds for my assistantship came from an extramural grant, the assitantship should be taxed because the grantor was expecting specific services from the grant recipient (i.e., my faculty adviser). The IRS would not...

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