Practice management

The former manager of an H&R Block outlet has been sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison for using the identities of his former tax preparation clients to file false returns with the Internal Revenue Service seeking fraudulent income tax refunds.

A continued focus on customer experience, cloud and mobile initiatives and payments -- along with staying the branding and product course laid out over the past two years -- was the primary tone of this year’s Sage Summit user and partner event.

Conservative economist Dr. Arthur Laffer has co-written a study that identified a positive economic impact in efforts to require online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers on Internet purchases.

I'd like to take this opportunity to diverge from the news of the week to expound upon a couple of topics, namely what has become somewhat of a religious debate over the cloud as well as some thoughts on upcoming vendor events.

The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has produced an action plan at the request of the G20 finance ministers to address the problems of base erosion and profit shifting that are depleting corporate tax revenue as multinational companies transfer their profits to low-tax countries.

Seth Zarny, head of Raffa P.C.'s technology consulting practice, explores the renewed interest in CPA firms providing technology consulting services, and summarizes the reasons for successes and failures in this area.

A petition of nearly 4,000 practitioner signatures has gone to the IRS to urge it to reverse its decision to retire two e-Services products used to file disclosure authorizations and resolve IRS account problems.

Captive insurance companies, once the exotic plaything of large corporations, are now open and advantageous to much smaller companies. But most accountants don’t know enough about captive insurance companies to advise their business clients on the advantages of starting their own, according to Brian McCormick and Jerry Messick of Elevate Captives LLC.

For some companies that got a temporary reprieve from the IRS in the height of the recession, the payback isn’t going to be as bad as they expected.

The Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general told Congress he’s “disturbed” that he didn’t receive until this month a July 2010 document that mentioned scrutiny of “progressive” nonprofit groups.

CCH said it has been selected for the ninth straight year by the Internal Revenue Service to deliver sales tax rate and taxability tables to help millions of Americans prepare their tax returns.

Everyone is talking about moving to the cloud as though you can just snap your fingers and suddenly change everything from software to workflow to paperless systems. But the reality is that getting completely to the cloud, no matter how compelling, will take a while.

A California businessman has pleaded guilty to concealing a foreign bank account at an Israeli bank on his 2007 tax return.

Acumatica has launched a campaign to add new reseller partners by mailing out a pair of “flip flop” sandals complete with a URL to the registration site for the company’s upcoming partner conference.

A former Internal Revenue Service employee was sentenced in a Manhattan federal court to three years of probation for violating a criminal conflict of interest law and to illegally disclosing confidential audit information during the time he was an IRS employee.

The Taxpayer Protection Program that the Internal Revenue Service implemented in an effort to curb the problem of identity theft-related tax fraud is improving the IRS’s efforts at detecting identity theft, but the case-processing controls need to be strengthened to reduce the burden on taxpayers victimized by identity theft, according to a new government report.

The American Center for Law and Justice, which has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 41 Tea Party and other conservative groups that claim to have been unlawfully targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, said Wednesday it is rejecting the government's offer for "expedited review" of applications for some conservative groups that have been waiting for years for a determination on their tax-exempt status, calling the offer “deeply flawed.”

A group of House Republicans whose committees have been investigating the Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday they have found evidence of delays created by the IRS Chief Counsel office in the screening of applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups.

Armanino has released Dynamic Insights, a software package for reporting and analytics designed to integrate with and utilize data from a company’s existing Microsoft Dynamics AX or GP system.

NetSuite partner ERP Guru has unveiled its Business Monitoring Suite (BMS), designed to allow customers the ability to better monitor and benchmark their business in real-time versus industry peers.