Tax practice

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., and Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee chairman Charles Boustany, Jr., R-La., have written a letter to the advocacy group Democracy 21 asking it to provide all communications with the former director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations unit, Lois Lerner, including emails.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has released her mid-year report to Congress, in which she urges the Internal Revenue Service to issue refunds to victims of tax preparer fraud and expand the IRS’s recently announced voluntary tax preparer education program to include competency testing.

A group of senators has introduced a bipartisan bill governing sales taxes on online purchases and Internet access after previous legislation failed to make progress in the House.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to cut the Internal Revenue Service’s budget by $1.14 billion in another blow to the tax agency.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued final regulations on truncated taxpayer identification numbers, or TTINs, to safeguard against identity theft.

The House has approved by voice vote legislation permanently banning states from taxing Internet access or imposing multiple or discriminatory taxes on e-commerce.

The American Institute of CPAs has filed a federal lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service challenging the legality of the IRS's plans for voluntary continuing education and testing of tax preparers.

The Internal Revenue Service has partially withdrawn some of the rules it had earlier proposed on limiting rollovers from individual retirement arrangements.

A former California tax preparer was sentenced Monday to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to charges that he filed dozens of false tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service.

The nonpartisan Tax Foundation research group has released a primer on the Marketplace Fairness Act, the legislation that proposes to establish federal law governing sales taxes on online purchases.

You’ve been patient, e-mail after e-mail and letter after letter. Still the client’s fees sit unpaid for almost half a year. Last season’s delinquents still have a couple months to go, but soon it may be time for you to call in help.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

The House of Representatives voted to prevent companies that move their tax addresses from the U.S. to Bermuda or the Cayman Islands from winning some federal contracts.

The U.S. House of Representatives voted to let companies write off more than half the cost of investments in the first year, providing a tax boost to businesses.

An Internal Revenue Service employee has been suspended for 100 days without pay for urging taxpayers to re-elect President Obama in 2012.

Lawmakers in the U.S. House and Senate are advancing dueling measures today that would provide a short-term cash infusion through May 2015 to a fund covering the federal share of road, bridge and mass-transit projects.

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

The Internal Revenue Service is being urged to modernize the process of filing amended tax returns in a new government report that estimates the IRS could be losing billions of dollars from erroneous tax refunds claimed on amended tax returns.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

American manufacturer Ingersoll-Rand Co. forged the tools that carved the Panama Canal and shaped Mount Rushmore. When it shifted its legal address to Bermuda in 2001 to reduce taxes, the maneuver sparked bipartisan outrage in Congress.