Practice management

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has released its Semiannual Report to Congress, with a special focus on how the Internal Revenue Service has handled its responsibilities under the Affordable Care Act.

Bank Leumi Le-Israel Ltd. agreed to pay $400 million and admit it helped American clients evade taxes for a decade.

New York Representative Michael Grimm reportedly will plead guilty to a single count of tax evasion less than two months after winning re-election to Congress.

And so it begins, the time of year when you’re likely to get inundated with appointment requests and phone calls from your small business clients, looking for advice to help them save money and protect them from potential IRS penalties as they close out the books for 2014.

ClientyWhys has launched TaxBuzz.com, a free online directory of tax professionals.

Next month, the IRS will auction off Darryl Strawberry’s right to receive payments under his deferred comp agreement with the New York Mets.

SocialCPAs and Inovautus Consulting have released the results of their annual survey of how accounting firms use social media, and the results are not encouraging.

Jill Lock, director of marketing at Isdaner & Company, discusses how her firm gets the word out about services such as art taxation, in an interview with AccountingToday.com editor-in-chief Michael Cohn at Accounting Today's Growth & Profitability Summit in Boca Raton, Fla.

As a follow-up to last week’s column, here are some value-added benefits to consider when performing obligatory services such as an audit or tax return, or any work for a client.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

KPMG’s investment arm, KPMG Capital, has begun making some of its first investments in data analytics companies, with the first funding made public in the Los Angeles-based company Bottlenose, which specializes in real-time trend intelligence.

An tax preparer was sentenced to 57 months in prison for filing false claims with the Internal Revenue Service using the identification of a dead tax return preparer whose practice he had acquired and preparing false documents for numerous fraudulent loans and tax returns.

Highlights of some of our favorite tax-related blogs from the past week.

The Tax Court held that the owner of a construction company who paid to sponsor his son’s motocross racing activities could deduct the payments since he was able to show that this helped him bring in business.

The Internal Revenue Service is joining with several national tax and accounting organizations to give taxpayers new options and tips on selecting reputable tax professionals and avoiding unscrupulous preparers.

The Internal Revenue Service has decreased its oversight of charities in recent years due to budget cuts and political pressure.

The IRS is freezing hiring, stopping most overtime pay and warning that it won’t answer about half the calls it will receive during the upcoming tax-filing season.

The $1.1 trillion spending bill passed by Congress this week and signed into law by President Obama on Tuesday contains a provision directing the Treasury Department to implement uniform standards for taxpayers claiming refundable credits such as the Earned Income Tax Credit to stem improper payments.

Congress’s long-awaited passage of tax extenders legislation provides a short-term extension through only the end of this year of dozens of familiar tax breaks for businesses and individuals, along with a new savings program for the disabled.

The U.S. Senate sent a $42 billion package of tax incentives to President Obama for his signature, reviving dozens of lapsed breaks for 2014 and setting them to expire two weeks from tomorrow.