Tax practice

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

Is it too early to start thinking about tax extenders? Not according to Kathleen King, managing director of Alvarez & Marshall Taxand’s Washington, D.C., office.

Takeaways from the first season of the repair regulations

The Internal Revenue Service is providing a safe harbor for contracts on services that are performed on a regular basis such as janitorial and landscape maintenance and software support.

Seventeen states will soon offer sales tax holidays where state sales tax charges are temporarily dropped on back-to-school items and other qualifying products.

Open Text Corp.’s chief executive officer said the technology company may take the Internal Revenue Service to court to fight a proposed tax increase.

Ted Cruz thwacked the gavel—and then thwacked the IRS.

Tax savings drove the acquisition strategy of Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. and led to Burger King’s move to Canada, according to a U.S. Senate committee report.

The Internal Revenue Service is hampered by incomplete information from health insurance marketplaces in its efforts to oversee tax breaks for individuals in the Affordable Care Act, according to a new government report.

The Internal Revenue Service’s total tax debt inventory has increased 23 percent since 2009 to $380 billion, according to a new government report, while the agency’s collection staff has declined 23 percent after years of budget cuts.

House Ways and Means Committee members Charles Boustany, R-La., and Richard Neal, D-Mass., have released a bipartisan proposal to create a so-called “innovation box,” a lower tax rate on income derived from intellectual property to encourage more multinational companies to keep intangible assets in the U.S.

In a rebuke to the Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service, the Tax Court has invalidated regulations under Section 482 of the Tax Code that require the sharing of stock-based compensation.

Electronic payments and banking technology provider ACI Worldwide said the Internal Revenue Service has extended its relationship with the company’s OfficialPayments.com online bill payment service portal.

In the first two quarters of 2015, there were 207 sales and use tax rate changes, up from 159 in the first six months of 2014, according to a new report.

UBS AG and a banker-turned-whistleblower were deemed to have too “unclean hands” to bring a malicious prosecution lawsuit against a real-estate developer who had accused them of duping him into filing a false tax return.

Republicans in the U.S. House called for the firing of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, saying the man brought in to turn around the tax agency has lost their trust.

Additional victims of the early May’s severe storms, tornadoes, straight-line winds and flooding in parts of Texas may qualify for tax relief from the IRS.

Tension between ACA credits and mandates continues after the King decision

The Internal Revenue Service has released final regulations for filing a claim for credit or refund to provide guidance to taxpayers as to the proper place to file a claim for credit or refund.

Stephen A. Whitlock, the director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Whistleblower Office, has been named director of the IRS’s Office of Professional Responsibility, effective Aug. 3, 2015.