Tyler Perry came dangerously close to being $9 million shortchanged by the IRS.
Perry exposed his tax inadequacies at the 2022 Earn Your Leisure Conference, which put him in a number of sticky financial situations.
“Money isn’t something that I had, and nobody taught me that taxes had to be paid,” Perry said, according to Finurah. “I didn’t go to college, but I paid for Harvard many times over in the mistakes that I made.”
Perry understands that taxes are a gray area, but he also understood how crucial it was for taxes to be done to a certain standard given the amount of money he is making from his expanding media empire.
Perry, therefore, did the proper thing by hiring accountants to conduct audits to make sure his financial statements complied with the demands of the federal agency.
Early on, Perry noticed some warning signs, such as an accountant who seemed shadily interested in how Perry was handling his cash. Perry thought the conduct was improper. The agency then appointed a replacement when he later fired the auditor from the case.
What’s more, Perry reveals the auditing process took three years, and “hundreds of thousands of dollars” went down the drain.
“So this audit went on for three years,” Perry said. “I’m spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in accounting with accountants for the audit and I am getting so mad, and so frustrated. ‘Why the hell is this going on?’ ‘What is it?’ And what I realized in my frustration is that ‘Wait a minute, there’s something to learn here.’ ‘Sit back and just see where it goes.’”
“We get to the end of the audit and the IRS owed me $9 million. They owed me $9 million,” Perry said in disbelief.
He continued: “All my accountants come running, [and] said ‘Oh my God, isn’t that great?’ ‘Isn’t that great?’ I say, ‘No, hell no!’ ‘How did you miss me paying $9 million?’ So, I had to stop going to H&R Block for my taxes at some point.”
Finurah reports the accountants were eventually fired for the costly mistake, but Perry still found a silver lining to turn the situation into a teachable moment.
“I learned in progress, and it’s okay. Listen in business, it’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to learn, to have to learn, but do learn. Don’t let it keep happening over and over again. And that’s one thing about me. I’ll let you make a million mistakes, but you can’t do the same thing over and over again. And that’s how I run my business,” Perry explained.
