r/breakingbad • u/Boring_Elevator3817 • 9h ago

RJ Mitte (Walt Jr) has passed 😥

Wow, I was shocked to hear this. They are saying it was suicide. So sad. He was only 34 years old. RIP, Flynn ❤️

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388

u/domwallflower 9h ago

It angers me that he had a horrible agent who pretty much ruined him financially and that probably affected his mental health

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u/MrBigPapaPump666 9h ago

What happened??

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u/sladeshied 8h ago

Somebody on a Reddit post about RJ last year said

"His financial manager also defrauded him, by using his tax checks for her own spending, rather than actually paying taxes. She also showed faked receipts about having payed the taxes. This continued over several years and interest was accumulating on his tax debt. At the end he spent 10 years paying back his taxes and interest, costing him pretty much all of his earnings from breaking bad."

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u/LewnaJa 8h ago

It's actually insanely fucked up that the IRS didn't think "hey maybe we should put the person responsible for the fraud in charge of the debt and let the guy who was taken advantage of get a tax break."

But no. Fuck this shit.

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u/pyrotechnic15647 7h ago

Yea this is how the IRS typically operates and it’s extremely fucked. If your accountant fucks you over, the IRS will always come for you, not them.

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u/bwaredapenguin 7h ago

Investigating and prosecuting scammers who swindle their clients out of money isn't within the scope of the IRS. It absolutely sucks that it happened to him, but it'd be up to him to try to press charges or file suit. Tax fraud is fudging numbers or concealing taxable income. It's not about letting someone control and misappropriate your assets.

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u/RedMarsRepublic 7h ago

I mean if they were telling him that they paid the taxes and faking receipts of it, that's fraud, in a functioning country the state would punish that.

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u/bwaredapenguin 7h ago

And there certainly are measures to attack that. But claiming that's the responsibility of the IRS in particular is ludicrous. And it's entirely possible that he signed a contract that fucked him over and made this asset management situation entirely legal despite being immoral (the legality of malicious or deceiving contracts is a different conversation).

But honestly I'm just challenging the notion that the IRS should have proactively dealt with this. Never in a million years would I have thought I'd be defending the IRS, but here we are.

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u/LewnaJa 7h ago

And yet the IRS knew how much he owed and let it accrue interest instead of sending him a letter saying "hey by the way you owe us money."

But the IRS always does that shit to maximize its profits. Absolutely fucking stupid.

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u/bwaredapenguin 7h ago

Blame TurboTax, H&R Block, and the other big tax accounting firms for that. They absolutely have the ability to bill us directly but regulations derived from lobbyists prevents us from keeping up with the rest of the Western world when it comes to annual tax reconciliation.

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u/JohnnyRelentless 5h ago

But the IRS always does that shit to maximize its profits.

This is absurd. IRS bureaucrats aren't scheming to take more than is owed. It's not like it's going in their own pockets.

Some of you guys have this weird idea about the people spending their lives serving the country. You've been told over and over again by right-wing media that they're all 2 dimensional villains from a really bad movie and somehow grown adults fall for it. Smh

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u/LewnaJa 5h ago

We literally have a predatory tax system that lets people rack up the fees. How is that absurd lol. The more the IRS makes, the more tax dollars gained. Nobody said anything about personal profit. Why would you think someone has to be a right winger to understand that 😂

I'm just saying it isn't right. Modern countries send you a bill and you pay it. The IRS knows what we owe, and yet they purposely hold off on telling us if we didn't guess right. What other purpose does that serve other than to maximize the dollars gained?

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u/JohnnyRelentless 5h ago

The IRS does what the lawmakers make them do, and the lawmakers do what the tax lobbyists bribe them to do. You make it sound like they're taking it upon themselves to fill their coffers with money they're not owed.

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u/LewnaJa 5h ago

No, absolutely not lol

The IRS is subject to the administration that runs it. I'm not in disagreement with you here. I just find that the way the system has run for a long time is predatory. And, as you say, is filled with bribes and lobbying. It's just unfortunate.

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u/Lou-AC 1h ago

I think all tax authorities do this, the person has to pay but they're expecting that the person can get their money back through civil or criminal legal action. Unfortunately many victims don't try that or find their evidence and record keeping wasn't good enough to prove the fraud