Tax practice

Grant Thornton has released a set of tax season tips for both individuals and businesses.

About 52 percent of Americans intend to spend their annual tax refund on necessary expenses such as loans, credit cards and other household expenses, while another 30 percent plan to put the money into savings and only 8 percent plan to invest the tax refund money, according to a new survey.

Taxpayer satisfaction with personal interactions with the Internal Revenue Service remained high despite high-profile controversies in the past year, but there has been some decline in public support for IRS funding, according to an annual survey of taxpayer attitudes.

The American Institute of CPAs has sent a letter outlining a set of legislative proposals to the leaders of Congress’s two main tax committees, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, recommending ways to simplify the tax laws and make them fairer.

The Internal Revenue Service has significantly increased its enforcement actions against tax criminals and its rate of convicting them, according to a new report from the IRS’s Criminal Investigation unit.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., sent a letter Monday to the Internal Revenue Service’s new commissioner, John Koskinen, demanding he turn over documents related to last year’s scandal involving IRS scrutiny of tax-exempt applications or else he would be forced to “compel them.”

Number 10: The lunchroom is finally filled with extra snacks.

Group-of-20 nations agreed to implement a global standard for automatically exchanging information between tax authorities by the end of 2015, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

The number of tax lawsuits filed has declined nearly 10 percent in the past year, and is down more than 30 percent from five years ago, according to a new report.

The IRS should have the authority to regulate tax preparers.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases, including jail time for the crooked preparer who was caught by a vigilant mail carrier.

As the poet Edgar Guest tells us, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ just to make a house a home,” or, in a case just decided by the New York Court of Appeals, to at least make it a “permanent place of abode.”

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

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen took some time off from his busy filing season schedule to discuss some questions posed by our readers and staff.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service released a final package of regulations Thursday to implement the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and amend the regulations to align them with existing tax rules.

The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a hearing next week on a crackdown on offshore tax evasion that has stalled as prosecutors conduct criminal probes of 14 banks, including Credit Suisse Group AG.

The top Republican tax writer in Congress will release a draft plan to revamp the U.S. tax code amid political odds that are stacked against him.

Internal Revenue Service commissioner John Koskinen said the IRS is still looking at various options after losing an appeal on its authority to regulate tax preparers, but now sees a further appeal as unlikely.

The Internal Revenue Service has released its annual “Dirty Dozen” list of tax scams, cautioning taxpayers to protect themselves against a wide range of schemes ranging from identity theft to tax return preparer fraud this tax season.

Participants in the Internal Revenue Service’s Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program were more likely to disclose foreign bank accounts from Switzerland than other countries, according to a new government report.