Tax practice

The Internal Revenue Service has issued an updated Qualified Intermediary Agreement for foreign banks that have been approved to withhold funds from a client’s bank account to be paid to the IRS.

Former attorney and CPA Paul M. Daugerdas, 63, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for orchestrating a massive scheme in which he and co-conspirators hawked fake tax shelters for wealthy individuals to evade more than $1.6 billion in federal taxes.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

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

Now that school is out (unless you live in a part of the country still making up for lost “snow days”), it’s easy to get caught up in the general euphoria and take a vacation from thoughts of tax preparation for the summer. But now is precisely the time preparers need to keep communication lines open with their clients, according to Chuck McCabe, president of Peoples Income Tax and The Income Tax School.

The Internal Revenue Service is moving ahead with a voluntary tax preparer education program after legal challenges derailed an earlier mandatory testing and continuing education program.

The Internal Revenue Service has successfully implemented a provision of the Affordable Care Act involving prescription drug fees imposed on pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers, according to a new report.

A new study suggests that tax filing season could be the best time to sign up clients for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act rather than the current open enrollment period.

House Republicans are accusing Lois Lerner, the former director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations unit, of emailing a colleague about subjecting Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to an IRS examination.

The House Ways and Means Committee has approved legislation aimed at simplifying the many tax credits available for education.

The Internal Revenue Service has posted an updated Foreign Financial Institution Agreement on its Web site for implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA.

The American Institute of CPAs has sent a letter expressing strong concern with the Internal Revenue Service’s proposed voluntary certification program for tax return preparers, saying it “would cause significant legal problems that may ultimately frustrate the IRS’s goals, confuse the public, and lead to litigation.”

The IRS Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee presented its 2014 Annual Report to Congress during a public meeting Tuesday, with recommendations including the creation of an online IRS account for individual and business taxpayers and tax professionals.

U.S. lawmakers argued late into the night over a computer hard drive that crashed in 2011, taking the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service to a new level of acrimony.

A central character in the 14-month dispute in Congress over the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups is a computer hard drive.

To everyone but tax attorneys, the disclaimers referring to “Circular 230” that appear in the legends of most law firm e-mails are inscrutable as well as ubiquitous. The Internal Revenue Service has now changed its rules so that those disclaimers can be deleted permanently.

Bloomberg BNA has released FATCA — Information Reporting and Withholding Under Chapter 4, a new report portfolio in which international tax practitioners from PricewaterhouseCoopers analyze the reporting and withholding requirements imposed by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act on both financial and non-financial institutions.

Love them or hate them, there’s one thing everyone can agree upon about the major government-mandated changes sweeping through the world of health care insurance: They’re confusing. And since so many of the changes involves taxes, don’t be surprised if your clients expect you to have all the answers.

The House Ways and Means Committee chairman called for a special prosecutor to probe the Internal Revenue Service’s loss of e-mails from the time the agency gave extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases, including a surprising number of cases involving fraudulent families.