Tax practice

The deadline is coming up this week for lawmakers in Congress to submit their preferences for the “must have” tax breaks that need to be kept in the Tax Code under Senate Finance Committee leaders’ “blank slate” approach to tax reform.

Thomson Reuters has introduced Checkpoint Pocket Assistant, a mobile app that helps tax and accounting professionals perform tasks from an Apple iPhone.

Thomson Reuters has integrated the upcoming back-to-school tax holidays into its ONESOURCE Indirect Tax Software.

The chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have written to the head of the Internal Revenue Service about the status of several of the officials who resigned or were placed on administrative leave in the wake of the Tea Party targeting scandal.

The Internal Revenue Service spent over $4.8 million in fiscal year 2011 and $4.7 million in fiscal year 2012 for executive travel, according to a new government report.

A pair of lawmakers plan to introduce bipartisan legislation in the House that would provide permanent tax incentives to family farmers, ranchers and other land owners who choose not to develop their land and instead preserve their property for conservation.

A pair of congressional subcommittee chairmen are asking the head of the Internal Revenue Service about a recent report that the agency accidentally posted thousands of Social Security numbers on the Internet.

Your client has a successful closely held business. Perhaps your client has already indicated that, at some indeterminate point in the future, the business will be sold. Even if your client has not given such an indication, you are well advised to at least broach the topic as a matter of long-term contingency planning.

The former manager of an H&R Block outlet has been sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison for using the identities of his former tax preparation clients to file false returns with the Internal Revenue Service seeking fraudulent income tax refunds.

Conservative economist Dr. Arthur Laffer has co-written a study that identified a positive economic impact in efforts to require online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers on Internet purchases.

The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has produced an action plan at the request of the G20 finance ministers to address the problems of base erosion and profit shifting that are depleting corporate tax revenue as multinational companies transfer their profits to low-tax countries.

A petition of nearly 4,000 practitioner signatures has gone to the IRS to urge it to reverse its decision to retire two e-Services products used to file disclosure authorizations and resolve IRS account problems.

Captive insurance companies, once the exotic plaything of large corporations, are now open and advantageous to much smaller companies. But most accountants don’t know enough about captive insurance companies to advise their business clients on the advantages of starting their own, according to Brian McCormick and Jerry Messick of Elevate Captives LLC.

For some companies that got a temporary reprieve from the IRS in the height of the recession, the payback isn’t going to be as bad as they expected.

The Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general told Congress he’s “disturbed” that he didn’t receive until this month a July 2010 document that mentioned scrutiny of “progressive” nonprofit groups.

CCH said it has been selected for the ninth straight year by the Internal Revenue Service to deliver sales tax rate and taxability tables to help millions of Americans prepare their tax returns.

A California businessman has pleaded guilty to concealing a foreign bank account at an Israeli bank on his 2007 tax return.

A former Internal Revenue Service employee was sentenced in a Manhattan federal court to three years of probation for violating a criminal conflict of interest law and to illegally disclosing confidential audit information during the time he was an IRS employee.

The Taxpayer Protection Program that the Internal Revenue Service implemented in an effort to curb the problem of identity theft-related tax fraud is improving the IRS’s efforts at detecting identity theft, but the case-processing controls need to be strengthened to reduce the burden on taxpayers victimized by identity theft, according to a new government report.

The American Center for Law and Justice, which has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of 41 Tea Party and other conservative groups that claim to have been unlawfully targeted by the Internal Revenue Service, said Wednesday it is rejecting the government's offer for "expedited review" of applications for some conservative groups that have been waiting for years for a determination on their tax-exempt status, calling the offer “deeply flawed.”