Practice management

(Bloomberg) The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee voted to let companies write off more than half the cost of some investments immediately, providing a $287 billion tax cut to capital-intensive industries.

A federal jury found an 87-year-old Florida man owes the U.S. government civil penalties amounting to 150 percent of the value of his Swiss bank account, the biggest such penalty by percentage on record, his lawyers said.

Employers owed the Internal Revenue Service approximately $14.1 billion in delinquent Social Security, Medicare and individual federal income taxes that they had withheld from employee paychecks as of June 30, 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service is being urged to do more to assess penalties against them.

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

The Association for Accounting Marketing has handed out 43 awards for marketing achievement to accounting firms and their marketing employees.

U.S. corporations have reported to the Internal Revenue Service that 54 percent of their offshore profits are earned in 12 tax haven countries that, combined, only account for 4 percent of economic output among all countries where U.S. corporations do business.

A group of technology companies sent a letter Wednesday to leaders of the House Financial Services Committee objecting to legislation that would exempt companies with under $250 million in annual revenue from existing requirements to file financial statements as machine-readable open data.

Nearly 6 million Americans living abroad are facing a June 16 deadline to file their taxes this year.

Thomson Reuters has released a pair of new client marketing newsletters for CPA firms seeking to grow their accounting, auditing and international tax practices.

Between the rising popularity of content marketing and the fact that it isn’t going anywhere soon, many firms these days find themselves pondering the important question, “What do we have to say?”

The National Conference of CPA Practitioners is questioning a proposal to reinstate a discontinued program that would allow private contractors to collect unpaid tax debts on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

Thirteen Swiss banks face rising stakes in their own criminal probes after Credit Suisse Group AG set a new standard for punishment in the U.S. crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers are not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act if they simply reimburse employees for buying insurance through one of the exchanges instead of establishing a health insurance plan for employees.

A Rhode Island man has been convicted of threatening to assault and murder an Internal Revenue Service revenue agent and his family.

The Internal Revenue Service said it is now allowing some suspended or disbarred tax practitioners to obtain or renew preparer tax identification numbers and prepare federal tax returns for compensation as a result of recent court decisions in the Loving v. IRS case.

A former Chicago tax preparer was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for filing nearly 3,200 false federal income tax returns that claimed refunds totaling more than $3.37 million for clients.

The IRS Oversight Board has sent a letter to the leaders of Congress’s main tax committees urging them not to re-instate a privatized tax debt collection program.

Bernard Madoff’s fraud might have been detected with enough due diligence in mid-2006, more than two years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed, a U.S. Tax Court judge ruled.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases -- now with more insurance fraud!

The Internal Revenue Service plans to substantially change the regulations it proposed last fall for tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations and their political activities before moving ahead with a public hearing.