Michael Cohn

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:

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board appear to be growing tired of trying to resolve their many disagreements after 10 years of ups and downs in their relationship, and the main question now seems to be whether it will be an amicable split.

Accountants need to be wary of promoting their services as advisors who can help their clients achieve success at the same time the firms are auditing their books.

The congressional supercommittee called it quits this week only a couple of days before its November 23 deadline, unable to reach a consensus on either taxes or spending cuts.

The November 23 deadline for Congress’s deficit reduction “supercommittee” is only about a week away and effectively a few days less.

With only two weeks to go before a November 23 deadline, the congressional “supercommittee” of 12 that has been negotiating over cutting the budget deficit is now considering some far-reaching tax reform proposals.

The spectacular bankruptcy of MF Global this week has led to speculation about what led to the brokerage firm’s downfall.

The real-life inspiration for one of the card-counting blackjack players in the movie “21” told an audience at the Accounting Today Growth & Profitability Summit in Las Vegas about his system for winning at the casino tables and at life in general.

A few blocks away from the Accounting Today offices, the Occupy Wall Street movement is encamped at Zuccotti Park in New York.