Tax practice

Executives with Wolters Kluwer CCH described a series of improvements to their tax, accounting and auditing software products at the CCH Connections user conference in Orlando on Monday, including enhancements to leverage the power of Google and other popular search engines.

The Internal Revenue Service should improve the way it performs final testing of its computer systems prior to tax season to make sure they are working properly, according to a new government report.

A defense attorney at the tax-conspiracy trial of Raoul Weil, who once ran UBS AG’s global wealth-management business, sought to show that the government’s key witness resented his boss’s success.

Hal Hicks cleared his throat and addressed a roomful of peers in a midtown Manhattan auditorium. The topic: the tax-avoidance technique called inversion, in which a U.S. company claims a foreign legal address.

Our weekly roundup of tax-related investment strategies and news your clients may be thinking about.

Wolters Kluwer, CCH Small Firm Services and the National Association of Tax Professionals have teamed to offer ATX and TaxWise preparer customers varied tax-compliance education.

Two of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

A CPA from Dayton, Ohio, was sentenced to serve over a year in prison and a year of supervised release for helping the owners of the Cadillac Ranch restaurant chain evade taxes.

A federal judge has dismissed a pair of lawsuits against the Internal Revenue Service by over 40 conservative groups over the IRS’s handling of their applications for tax-exempt status.

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

Swiss banks seeking to avoid U.S. prosecution by disclosing how they helped Americans evade taxes asked the Justice Department this week to back off a dozen demands, including that they cooperate with other nations.

Raoul Weil, who once ran UBS AG’s global wealth-management business, referred to accounts hidden by U.S. clients from the Internal Revenue Service as “toxic waste,” a witness at his tax-conspiracy trial said.

Individuals who lost money in the stock market in 2014 may have other investment assets that have appreciated in value. These taxpayers should consider the extent to which they should sell appreciated assets before year end (if their value has peaked) and thereby offset gains with pre-existing losses.

The Internal Revenue Service is planning to improve the technology used by its Taxpayer Advocate Service to better handle the many requests it receives from taxpayers seeking help with their IRS problems, but the project has been put on hold due to budget cuts.

The Internal Revenue Service needs to go to greater lengths to safeguard taxpayer information on health insurance exchanges, according to a new government report.

The Internal Revenue Service posted the annual cost-of-living adjustments for pension plans and other retirement plans for 2015, allowing taxpayers to contribute up to $18,000 in their 401(k) plans in 2015.

The average tax refund in 2014 was $2,696, up 1.5 percent from the average refund of $2,656 in 2013, according to a new report on how well the Internal Revenue Service operated last tax season.

The number of companies lobbying the U.S. government on tax inversions more than doubled in the quarter ending Sept. 30, as they sought to prevent Congress and the Obama administration from imposing new restrictions.

A bipartisan group of 15 senators has written to the Internal Revenue Service urging the agency to do a better job of preventing tax refund fraud using stolen identities.

The Internal Revenue Service’s Office of Safeguards is not doing enough to protect the federal tax information that it is required to disclose to other government agencies, according to a new report.