Roger Russell

President Obama’s announcement on Monday of a compromise agreement with the Republican leadership should bring some end-of-year certainty to the tax landscape, but questions remain.

Preparers looking for a wish list of provisions for the lame duck session of Congress to pass have a number of items to consider.

If you’re like me, you habitually print out anything that you download from the Web before you start reading or working on it.

Here’s some good news for those who haven’t renewed their Preparer Tax Identification Number by the end of the year. The process to renew it will be the same beginning in January as it is now, and it takes only about 15 minutes to do online.

Whether you’re happy, sad or indifferent with the election results on Tuesday, elections do have consequences and will affect all of us. Especially tax preparers.

“The First-Time Homebuyer Credit will jump up and bite you in the shorts at least six times this next tax season,” Doug Van Der Aa told attendees at the Thomson Reuters Users Conference.

Reports have surfaced that the federal debt commission (officially known as the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform) is considering the heretofore unimaginable elimination of popular tax breaks, including deductions on mortgage interest, as part of its report due on December 1.

While we await the lame duck Congress to find out if and how much our taxes will rise next year, it might be well to remember that government — and the programs it loves to fund — will only keep growing until it runs out of funding. Hardly any government will willingly reduce programs, cut funding, or otherwise act within reasonable limits.

There may be some jobs tougher than beach master for the initial landing force at Omaha Beach during the Normandy invasion, or Commissioner of Internal Revenue, but off-hand I can’t think of any. Both positions are intense, all-consuming, and attract a great deal of incoming fire. And Mortimer Caplin has done both.

With the IRS hearings scheduled for today on the proposed Circular 230 regulations on education and testing of tax return preparers, it’s becoming somewhat confusing to remember just where we are in the process of registering preparers.

The lame duck session slated to begin in mid-November leaves Congress a massive amount of unfinished business.

Positions have hardened on the subject of tax preparer registration and the proposed regulations slated to become final before the program of registering for preparer tax identification numbers begins.

Although the pundits have already weighed in on theeconomic effects of the administration's latest proposals at improving jobs andinvestment, the specific legislation to enact the proposals faces hurdles,which will diminish the likelihood of an effect any time soon.

It’s been five years since former Senator Connie Mack, then chairman of the President’s Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, said the panel would “take a fresh look at the existing Tax Code and will formulate options for making the tax system simple, fair and productive.”

While there may be some truth to the observation that August is a slow news month, the start of World War I in early August of 1914, as well as the deaths of both Elvis and Marilyn in August, qualify as exceptions. And for small to midsized CPA firms, the hearings earlier this week on tax preparer registration can be considered newsworthy, though perhaps slightly less eventful.

My guess is that there’s at least a 50-50 chance that the new Form 1099 reporting mandate will be repealed or modified before it goes into effect. On almost anyone’s benefit-burden scale, the burdens far outweigh the benefits.

Thomson Reuters has acquired TaxSimple, one of the last independent software companies in the tax software market.

The Education Jobs and Medicaid Assistance Act of 2010 is basically a bailout for states that are living beyond their means and have problems meeting their payrolls.

The battle to extend or not to extend the Bush tax cuts has drawn comments from both sides on the potential positive or negative effects of the cuts.

Senior financial executives and tax directors say they lack formal policies and procedures to manage the IRS exam process effectively, despite reporting a noticeable increase in Internal Revenue Service corporate audit activity over 2008 levels, according to a recent survey by KPMG LLP.