Earlier this month, Girls Gone Wild promoter Joe Francis plea-bargained his way out of a possible prison sentence for charges related to filing false tax returns. By pleading guilty to filing false tax returns and bribing Nevada jail workers, Mr. Francis was sentenced to time served and one year of probation, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Initially accused of taking $20 million in fraudulent tax deductions, Francis ended up pleading guilty to a misdemeanor, the newspaper reported.

"It took us seven months, but in the end we demonstrated that the felony tax charges never should have been brought in the first place," Brad Brian, Francis' lead trial attorney, said in a statement.

But now the IRS is back for more.

Aaron Carter is having a bad week. Just days after his elimination from Dancing with the Stars' ninth season, news surfaced that Carter was slapped with an IRS lien worth more than $1 million. The liens, which were filed in Los Angeles last week, date back to 2003.

Carter has been trying to repair his bad boy image in recent months, including adding a new management team. Carter's current manager, Johnny Wright, told ET News, "It is unfortunate that while Aaron was a minor, his finances were grossly mismanaged by his previous team which has lead to the current situation of which he was unaware of until today. Aaron is working with a new team to take appropriate actions towards speedy resolution of the matter and looks forward to putting this behind him and moving forward with the next stage of his music career."

After losing about $7 million in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, 92-year old Zsa Zsa Gabor now has the IRS to deal with.

On Oct. 5, the IRS filed a lien for $118,321 for the years 2001 and 2002 with the Los Angeles County Recorder of Deeds.

According to The Associated Press, "Gabor lawyer Chris Fields estimates that Gabor lost about $7 million in Madoff's Ponzi scheme and the tax bill is part of the fallout. Fields says third-party money managers invested Gabor's money with Madoff."

How losing money in 2008 would lead to additional taxes being owed for 2001 and 2002 is a bit of a mystery to me. It's possible that she was trying to work out her tax issues with the IRS but with the losses to Madoff, no longer has the money to pay her back taxes.

When the Madoff fraud was first revealed, Gabor's husband, the 64-year old Frederic Prinz von Anhalt, lamented that the couple "might be forced to sell our Bel Air home."

Hopefully the IRS will be lenient with the couple in light of the massive losses they sustained at the hands of Bernie Madoff.

Headlines across the country are blasting that millions of taxpayers may owe come tax time because "the government was too generous with their new Making Work Pay tax credit," as the New York Daily News put it.

It sure makes for dramatic news coverage... only it's not quite right.

The government didn't make a mistake when calculating the Making Work Pay tax credit and this most definitely isn't something just hitting the radar of taxpayers. It just makes good headlines now.

The issue of too much withholding has been making news since the inception of the credit in early 2009. Yahoo even appeared to revamp an earlier version of the CNNMoney.com story released on this past Tuesday, titled "Stimulus surprise: 15 million people may owe taxes" from a piece released six months ago. Clicking on the link from the prior story, formerly here, now gives you a 404 error. Hmm.

The IRS recently updated consumers on all the tax savings you can get from making your home more green-friendly. Installing energy efficient windows and doors, insulation, roofing, HVAC, water heaters, and biomass stoves can save you a boatload of money on your taxes.

But will doing all those things really help the environment? Yes. But ya know what will help mother nature a hell of a lot more?

Not breeding.

If the trend in e-filing continues, the IRS expects more than 100 million individual taxpayers to file their tax returns electronically for the 2009 tax year.

More than one-third of those taxpayers will file by personal computer; the remainder will use a professional tax preparer or free file at an IRS site. No matter how you choose to e-file this year, following are some tips to make it as easy as possible.

Chances are, you filed your federal taxes electronically this year.

According to the IRS, about two out of every three individual taxpayers elected to e-file in 2009, up almost 6% from returns filed electronically in 2008. That works out to just a few million returns shy of 100 million individual returns, or 67% of tax returns.

It's a pretty incredible increase for the IRS e-file program which began just more than 20 years ago. In 1986, the first year of the program, just 25,000 refund-only returns were accepted in three locations, less than 1% of the returns filed in 2009.

With the national debt growing at a frantic pace, a lot of Americans are terrified about what it will mean for our economic futures.

Luckily, you can help. CNNMoney senior writer Jeanne Sahadi reports that under an obscure 1961 law, you can make tax deductible contributions to help pay down the national debt. On average, about five donations are made per week and so in 2009, there have been just over $3 million in donations -- whose impact was quickly reversed by government spending on just 666 clunkers under the Cash For Clunkers program (funny how that math works out, just sayin').

The first time home buyer tax credit has officially been extended. If you're an existing home owner you may also qualify for the tax credit if you're planning on buying a new house! Check out this week's episode of Show & Tell with The 2 Mortgage Guys and we'll fill you in with the "nuts & bolts" of this new program. You can also get the complete details by visiting federalhousingtaxcredit.com.

Ryan Minick and Steve DeLon are The 2 Mortgage Guys. Subscribe to their newsletter or visit them at www.The2MortgageGuys.com.

Soccer fans across the world can collectively offer up a sigh of relief: there will be no strike for soccer players in Spain. At least for now.

Spain's Professional Football League, the governing body that manages the major professional football leagues in Spain, has been making noise about going on strike. The organization is more or less the equivalent of the MLS here in the US since football in Europe is really soccer; the U.S. version of football is referred to as, well, American football.

The Internal Revenue Service might be looking for you -- but not for the reasons that you think. The IRS is actually looking to dole out refunds worth more than $123.5 million to taxpayers whose refund checks were returned to the IRS by the U.S. Postal Service due to mailing address errors.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman wants taxpayers to come forward, saying, "We are eager to get this money into the hands of taxpayers, so don't delay if you think you are missing a refund. The sooner you update your address information, the quicker you can get your refund."

Updating your address with the IRS is easy. You can update your address online by visiting the "Where's My Refund?" tool on the IRS web site or use the telephone version of "Where's My Refund?" by calling 1-800-829-1954. You can also complete a Form 8822, Change of Address, downloadable as a pdf via the IRS web site or call 800–TAX–FORM (800–829–3676) to have a Form 8822 mailed to you.

The average number of undeliverable refunds rose by 16% this year, but the 107,831 refunds which remain outstanding still total less than 1% of the more than 142 million returns processed by the IRS. If you haven't received your refund, check with the IRS to see if your check was one of those returned by the post office. If it wasn't, and your check remains undelivered, you can receive a replacement check within six to eight weeks of making a claim by calling 1-800-829-1954.

Remember, a tax refund is your money. Don't leave it on the table.

Billionaire hedge fund manager Julian Robertson won a $27 million tax case after convincing a a judge that he wasn't a resident of New York City in the year 2000 -- and it all came down to four days.

The way the law works is that anyone who spends more than half the year living in New York City is subject to the jurisdiction's taxes -- in 2000, the top tax rate was 3.78%, meaning that Mr. Robertson must have earned around $700 million in the year 2000.

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance argued that because he couldn't provide proof that he didn't spend more than half the year in New York City, he had to pay the tax. Robertson and his lawyers, family, and his assistants spent countless hours pouring over schedules, calendars, tickets, etc. to convince a judge that he spent less than half the year in NYC proper -- with a good chunk of the rest of his time spent on Long Island.

Like H1N1, the notion of taxing text messages and other new electronic forms of communication has taken root and is threatening to go pandemic.

The city of Vallejo, Calif. is voting today on expanding utility taxes to include text messages, pager messages and VOIP calls. The measure would lump these together with gas, electricity, water and other utilities, while lowering the overall utility tax rate from 7.5% to 7.3%.

This follows the example set by Sacramento and 40 other towns in California which have added electronic communications to their taxable utilities, both to reduce the burden on those clinging to land-lines and to increase city revenue.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Vallejo's general fund has lost $18 million in the past two years. It declared bankruptcy in 2008.

While officials contend that the change will have only a minimal impact on a typical resident's utility bill, some locals are concerned that the measure opens up the door for taxes on other forms of communication not presently taxed. I'm wondering about passenger pigeons.

As more and more people abandon land-lines, many communities will be looking to replace lost tax revenue by charging for text messages, voice-over-Internet calls, e-mails, and IM conversations. If they could, some would probably charge by the syllable for face-to-face coffee house conversations. If so, we'd probably learn to abbrev wht we sed 2 sv $.

As if you don't already have enough money worries. This is the year to double, no, triple-check, your taxes before filing. The IRS is looking for the money it's owed with renewed vigor, and that means a lot more people can expect to be audited. Why now? It's not hard to guess.

We've been hearing for months that the economy is finally on its way up, but the numbers don't actually bear that out.

As of last month, the federal deficit weighed in at a record $1.42 trillion and, depending on what Congress does, could double within the year. Estimates are that within the next ten years, the deficit will hit $9.1 trillion. Increases in the budget have been tapped for bailouts, CASH for clunkers, the first time homebuyer's credit and the controversial new health care plan. The problem? There's no money to pay for all of these programs.