Practice management

A former UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, pled guilty to conspiring with an American billionaire real estate developer, Swiss bankers and co-defendant Mario Staggl to help the developer evade paying $7.2 million in taxes by helping him conceal $200 million of assets in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The American Institute of CPAs has formed an online Succession Planning Resource Center to help small and midsized firms deal with questions of how their firm should be managed in the future.

Seventy-six percent of the 120 firms in attendance at the Forum for Women in Accounting, a three-day confab in its second year, have a strategic plan in place.

Charles Merrill, a self-made millionaire and cousin of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch, could end up serving three years or more in jail for not filing income taxes since beginning a tax protest in 2004.

A judge has ruled against the Internal Revenue Service in a Freedom of Information Act case, telling the agency to stop defying her previous orders and turn over statistical information to an outside researcher.

A group of eight midsized CPA firms has banded together to offer cross-border tax services in an effort to compete with larger firms.

The House Ways and Means Committee has passed a bill aimed at forestalling the spread of the alternative minimum tax for another year.

The Internal Revenue Service has granted an extension to victims of the Midwest floods so they will have more time to make their quarterly estimated tax payments.

It takes solid strategies and steps to grow a niche business, and Gale Crosley, president of Crosley + Co., shared some of her strategies with approximately 100 participants during a pre-conference session at the Forum for Women in Accounting here.

The Research Claims Audit Techniques Guide: Credit for Increasing Research Activities Section 41 just released by the IRS is a great roadmap for practitioners of what to expect on an audit. Although the research credit has not been extended, it is expected to be. This guide issued by the Large and Mid Size Business Division (LMSB-04-0508-030) really shows how IRS will scrutinize research credit refund claims (RC claims), which have been designated a Tier I Issue, which in turn means they are of high strategic importance to LMSB and have significant impact on one or more industries. The guide is particularly geared toward those prepared under the most common approach being used, prepackaged RC claim studies. How those studies are typically done is explained in detail, as well as the potential problems that IRS sees with them. Eustace, T.C. Memo 2001-66, aff’d 312 F.3d 1254 (7th Cir. 2002) is cited as presenting a typical research credit claim involving an accounting firm study and a prepackaged submission. This is an extensive section in the guide on how an auditor should go about evaluating RC study-based claims and specific advice that an information document request (IDR) should be made for the engagement letter from the outside consultant conducting the study. Even the accompanying exhibits have great information, such as a 19-step checklist that the auditor should follow when reviewing the claim, a comprehensive mandatory research credit claims IDR, and even a check sheet to help deal with computational issues. I don’t get excited by every audit technique issued, but this captured my interest because it reminded me of a guide IRS put out a number of years ago on cost segregation. That guide was used by some practitioners as a blueprint on how to successfully conduct a cost segregation study that would withstand IRS review. Both that and the latest guide illustrate that as more professionals utilize studies as significant revenue generators by justifying the fees charged as a small percentage of the tax benefits obtained, IRS will adopt a uniform policy with regard to them. There is a great benefit to this as the audit technique guide is very informative and explains exactly what won’t and will pass IRS muster.

The Internal Revenue Service violated some of its own legal requirements in some of the seizures of taxpayer property it conducted in the past two years, according to a new report.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued proposed regulations implementing amendments to the tax return preparer penalties.

One of the consequences of the credit crisis that began in the summer of 2007 was the deterioration in the U.S. housing market, rendering the valuations of securitized or structured mortgage-backed assets volatile.The contracting demand for these assets — which had been dramatically overvalued by brokers who earned substantial commissions by pushing over 600 varieties of these assets to hedge fund managers through repos that were leveraged without regulatory bounds — precipitated the tightening of unsecured term funding. That led to credit downgrades, massive write-downs of MBS assets by financial institutions according to mark-to-market accounting rules, and illiquidity.

IRS PLANS TAX SHELTER CRACKDOWNWashington, D.C. — Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman promised to continue enforcement efforts against tax shelters.

Let’s face it: The next 15 years are going to be hard for small firms to compete and survive. The external environment and demographic facts speak clearly:* 8,000 Baby Boomers are retiring each day.

International work assignments — both inbound and outbound, short-term and long-term — have become more common as the world gets “smaller” and “flatter.”While on foreign soil, most employees feel that they deserve additional compensation and that they should be at least somewhat released from the growing number of domestic tax rules that restrict compensation packages. Some of the more irksome rules restricting compensation arrangements lately are contained in the final regs under Code Sec. 409A on nonqualified deferred compensation.

The Internal Revenue Service is falling short on inspecting the international tax transactions of small businesses for compliance problems, according to a new report.

Reeling from an unfavorable court decision on its tax strategy, banking giant KeyCorp said it would take an after-tax accounting charge of between $1.1 billion and $1.2 billion in the second quarter, cut its dividend in half and raise another $1.5 billion by issuing shares.

The Internal Revenue Service said its e-Services online tools will be out of service the last weekend in June.

BKD said it is combining forces with the Hanke Group, allowing the Springfield, Mo.-based accounting firm to expand to Hanke's San Antonio and south Texas markets.