Taxation & Estate Planning

IRS Auction of Cowboys Tickets Nets $241,000

By Darrin Mish

In an IRS auction, six prime Dallas Cowboys tickets together with the rights to purchase future tickets were sold to a ticket broker based in Dallas for $241,000. The auction was held to pay off debts by Lending.com amounting to $4.5 million. According to records, the taxpayer debtor was Lending.com, a mortgage lender which was a proxy company for its chief executive, Douglas Van Arsedale. According to the IRS, the tickets did not belong to Van Arsedale, but he ?was using them.?

Van Arsedale is also listed as the founder and chief executive of Credit Solutions of America, a credit settlement company with the same business address as Lending.com in Park Central. Regulators in Texas and New York have accused the company of defrauding consumers because they did not negotiate settlements with its customers? creditors.

The package sold to ticket broker Hank Wendorf of Ticketsource.com includes six seats and the six parking passes for this season and the rights to buy those seats for the next 30 years. The auction attracted only 5 registered bidders but 2 contestants and lasted a mere 15 minutes. In actual fact, bidding for pro sports season tickets is rare.

By the time Wendorf, a self-professed Cowboys fan, pays the nearly $70,000 he owed to the Cowboys, he would have paid about $311,000, just slightly less than the original price of $320,000. The exact seats purchased were in section C110, behind the Cowboys bench, near the 40 and 50 yard lines. Wendorf says he still sees value in those numbers.

The opening bid price at the auction was $186,000 but it quickly ballooned to more than $220,000. The bidding was conducted by Darlene Shadday, an IRS property specialist. But to Wendorf, participating in the auction was a no-brainer, although he did have a maximum bid in mind. Bidding between him and the other ticket broker contestant was keen and the result was close between the two.

According to Wendorf, who grew up in Dallas, the seats he bought are the most valuable seats in the stadium and would make a suitable addition to the present collection of Cowboy stadium seats his 20-year old company has already bought.

As a savvy businessman, Wendorf has elected not to sell the entire package but instead offer seats one game at a time and keep his options. Other seats in the same section have been selling online for $575 a seat.

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IRS Auction of Cowboys Tickets Nets $241,000 is a post from: IRS Tax Problem Solver Blog - IRS Help

Full post as published by IRS Problem Solver Blog on September 09, 2010 (boomark / email).