Tax practice

These tools may save a marriage -- or at least make your job easier

The profession has tried for years to coordinate, regulate, certify and monitor a vocation where the only tool to control illegal financial trickery is the good will of professionals who probably work hard to obey the law anyway.

Some of our favorite recent tax cases.

Six former Internal Revenue Service employees have pleaded guilty to receiving unemployment benefits while they worked at the agency.

For tax preparers who were somewhat dismayed by the recent IRS statistics indicating a slight drop-off in the number of taxpayers who were using a professional to prepare their taxes as opposed to do-it-yourself tax software, take heart.

The push for a corporate tax holiday to encourage repatriation of an estimated $2.1 trillion in foreign profits seems to have gained traction again, thanks to a recent proposal from former President Bill Clinton, but such an idea could provide multinational companies with the incentive for earnings manipulation, according to a new study.

The IRS has issued a pair of one-page electronic publications containing information for individuals and families about the Affordable Care Act.

(Bloomberg) The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee voted to let companies write off more than half the cost of some investments immediately, providing a $287 billion tax cut to capital-intensive industries.

A federal jury found an 87-year-old Florida man owes the U.S. government civil penalties amounting to 150 percent of the value of his Swiss bank account, the biggest such penalty by percentage on record, his lawyers said.

Employers owed the Internal Revenue Service approximately $14.1 billion in delinquent Social Security, Medicare and individual federal income taxes that they had withheld from employee paychecks as of June 30, 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service is being urged to do more to assess penalties against them.

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

U.S. corporations have reported to the Internal Revenue Service that 54 percent of their offshore profits are earned in 12 tax haven countries that, combined, only account for 4 percent of economic output among all countries where U.S. corporations do business.

A group of technology companies sent a letter Wednesday to leaders of the House Financial Services Committee objecting to legislation that would exempt companies with under $250 million in annual revenue from existing requirements to file financial statements as machine-readable open data.

Nearly 6 million Americans living abroad are facing a June 16 deadline to file their taxes this year.

The National Conference of CPA Practitioners is questioning a proposal to reinstate a discontinued program that would allow private contractors to collect unpaid tax debts on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

Thirteen Swiss banks face rising stakes in their own criminal probes after Credit Suisse Group AG set a new standard for punishment in the U.S. crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers are not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act if they simply reimburse employees for buying insurance through one of the exchanges instead of establishing a health insurance plan for employees.

A Rhode Island man has been convicted of threatening to assault and murder an Internal Revenue Service revenue agent and his family.

The Internal Revenue Service said it is now allowing some suspended or disbarred tax practitioners to obtain or renew preparer tax identification numbers and prepare federal tax returns for compensation as a result of recent court decisions in the Loving v. IRS case.

A former Chicago tax preparer was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for filing nearly 3,200 false federal income tax returns that claimed refunds totaling more than $3.37 million for clients.