Tax practice

A roundup of some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

The number of presidential candidates has been steadily winnowing down in recent weeks as they suffer defeats in the primaries and caucuses, and so too their tax plans have been falling by the wayside.

If you’re in the tax preparation business, chances are you’ve had a client experience tax-related identity theft.

Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse has updated its Taxpayer Returns online tool with data through filing year 2014.

Fees are the fuel that keeps your practice running, yet many preparers hesitate to shake up fee structures no matter what those structures depend on.

The Internal Revenue Service has updated its venerable tax guide for this tax season.

In a media blitz last October, the billionaire investor Carl Icahn pledged to create a $150 million political organization to muscle an overhaul of the corporate tax code through a gridlocked Congress.

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

Although a recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll found just 6 percent of voters who lean Republican and 4 percent of those who lean Democrat rank taxes as the most important issue impacting their vote, one in five public company tax directors feel differently.

Nearly a quarter of Americans think it’s acceptable to lie to the Internal Revenue Service about under-the-table income.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is pursuing fraudsters posing as IRS agents who call to harass taxpayers about fictitious tax debts, calling them back to warn them about their criminal activity and getting the phone company to shut them down.

The American Institute of CPAs is crying foul over an ad by H&R Block suggesting that many CPAs don’t know how to prepare tax returns, but Block is promising to increase its competition with CPAs.

The House Ways and Means Committee passed a package of three bills Wednesday designed to save money for the federal government, including one that requires taxpayers claiming the Child Tax Credit to provide a Social Security number for the child to prevent undocumented immigrants from qualifying.

With a 400 percent surge in reported phone and email phishing and malware schemes this tax season, the American Institute of CPAs is working with Congress, the Internal Revenue Service and its members to combat tax-related identity theft and tax return fraud.

The owner and operator of Grant Tax Service, a tax preparation business in Vineland, N.J., has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 18 counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns and five counts of filing false income tax returns.

Apple Inc., facing a European Union probe into its fiscal affairs in Ireland, told a panel of EU lawmakers Tuesday it pays all taxes due in the nation and doesn’t get an unfair advantage compared with other companies there.

The Internal Revenue Service’s audits of business tax returns have declined steeply in recent years, thanks to successive rounds of budget cuts, according to a new analysis.

Greatland Corporation has compiled a list of misconceptions when it comes to tax-reporting requirements. Failing to understand the real truth behind these myths can cost a business extra money to file again or, even worse, to pay steep fines if reporting is not done in compliance with regulations.

Bloomberg BNA has upgraded its BNA State Tax Analyzer with a new NOL Manager function that predicts and analyzes the financial impact of state net operating losses on a business’s cash, effective tax rate and earnings per share.

Most clients who utilize accounting firms to prepare their tax returns make charitable contributions. Many do so in a tax-efficient manner by donating appreciated securities directly to charities or utilizing donor-advised funds through which they make their grants.