Tax practice

A roundup of tax news from the previous month.

Taxpayer satisfaction with personal interactions with the Internal Revenue Service remained high despite high-profile controversies in the past year.

Catch up on tax breaks we lost at the end of 2013

Whether they realize it or not, taxes ended up going up for most taxpayers last year, despite the extension of the Bush tax cuts at the beginning of last year.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., has announced he will not seek reelection after his term ends this year.

Thomson Reuters has released a special report focusing on President Obama’s 2015 budget proposal, which includes tax proposals such as the expansion and permanent extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Research Tax Credit, a number of new international tax proposals, and a renewed push for pairing infrastructure investments with business tax reform.

Nearly half of Americans prepare their own taxes, according to a new survey, and most of them seem to be convinced they are taking advantage of all the tax breaks available.

The guidance issued by the Internal Revenue Service this week treating virtual currencies such as Bitcoin as property rather than currency for federal tax purposes may end up helping Bitcoin investors, even though it means Bitcoin users will need to be extra careful to report their transactions from now on.

The Internal Revenue Service is warning consumers to beware of a new email phishing scam in which fraudulent emails purport to come from the IRS Taxpayer Advocate Service, complete with a bogus case number.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

Tax returns filed this season by tax professionals are down 1.3 percent so far compared to last year, while self-prepared returns are up 5.9 percent, according to the latest IRS statistics.

The Internal Revenue Service is permitting millions of dollars in potentially improper self-employed retirement plan deductions to be claimed, according to a new government report, which estimates that up to $71.4 million over five years could be saved with better controls.

State tax exam information requests are increasingly becoming more comprehensive and demanding.

A decade ago, few of us had heard of identity theft. Now, most of us know someone who has been a victim. And of course, a large portion of ID theft affects tax preparers and taxpayers directly, since tax refunds are a huge target of identity thieves.

With the April 15 tax day quickly approaching, a leading online tax preparer school is offering its own kind of relief in the form of student scholarships.

The Internal Revenue Service is providing guidance for 2014 that will allow taxpayers who are the victims of domestic violence to satisfy a joint filing requirement with a married-filing-separate return in order to obtain the Affordable Care Act's premium tax credit.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray, D-Wash., and two other prominent Senate Democrats introduced legislation Wednesday to update the Tax Code to help workers and families keep more of what they earn, but also double the penalty on tax preparers who do not follow the Internal Revenue Service’s due diligence requirements for claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit.

The Internal Revenue Service needs to do better at enabling its frontline employees to identify potentially dangerous tax practitioners, according to a new government report that found at least 84 taxpayer representatives who represented a threat to IRS employees and at least two instances of physical assault.

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

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in favor of the Obama administration in a dispute over taxes on severance compensation, overturning a lower court decision that could have forced the IRS to refund more than $1 billion.