Michael Cohn

Edvard Munch, the painter of “The Scream,” was no big fan of the Norwegian tax authorities.

The upcoming expiration of the Bush-era tax rates at the end of the year is already starting to produce its share of anxiety along with outsize forecasts of financial disruption.

With the interest rates for federally subsidized student loans scheduled to double from 3.4 to 6.8 percent in July, the topic has suddenly become a hot political issue.

With Democrats and Republicans in Congress battling over competing tax legislation this week, one new bill should be able to attract bipartisan support.

I had the unexpected surprise yesterday of lunching with Karl Rove, known as the architect of President George W. Bush’s election campaigns.

States are cracking down on software and devices that help businesses cheat on taxes at the cash register.

Like Katniss Everdeen, the young heroine of the hit movie “The Hunger Games,” auditing leaders are facing their own test of survival.

A bill advertised as creating jobs at small businesses and increasing their access to capital from the public markets would also knock down many of the auditing controls protecting investors.

A former bank executive has filed suit against the Internal Revenue Service for failing to pay him a whistleblower award.

Allen Stanford, the Texas financier convicted of masterminding a $7 billion fraud involving certificates of deposit in his Antiguan bank, tried to argue that his banking disclosures complied with International Financial Reporting Standards, but that didn’t convince the jury.

Now that the payroll tax cut extension is safely out of the way, the latest tax legislation gambit in Congress appears to be a tongue-in-cheek effort to provide an annual $250 tax deduction for people with mustaches.

What is the meaning of art? The IRS may have the answer.

After months of wrangling, congressional leaders appear to be close to a deal on extending the payroll tax cut, unemployment benefits, and the so-called “doc fix” for Medicare physician reimbursements through the end of the year.

The tax refund delays this tax season could be tied not only to new identity theft detection filters, but also to overly tight business rules written into the IRS’s Electronic Fraud Detection System.

The Internal Revenue Service needed to put the brakes on its tax refunds this tax season when newly installed filters to prevent tax fraud and identity theft held up processing for a week or more.

President Obama’s State of the Union address gave a preview of several of the administration’s tax policies over the coming year, including tax incentives to encourage more U.S.-based multinational corporations to bring jobs back home.

The Internal Revenue Service’s newest version of the Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program is designed to give some reassurance to taxpayers who have been hesitating to come forward and disclose their foreign bank accounts, but the increasing complexities of U.S. tax law are leading more people to renounce their citizenship.

Groundhog Day isn’t until next month, but the Internal Revenue Service is again invoking that same sense of déjà vu with its third Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program in the past three years.

President Obama may have run afoul of the Constitution in using a recess appointment to appoint Richard Cordray as the director of the nascent Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, but the need for the bureau to take action has been growing.

Accountants and tax practitioners had a busy time this past year keeping up with all the changes in the profession. Here’s our annual list of the top stories in the past year that kept our readers coming to the site for the latest developments: