Tax practice

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.”

A group of House Republicans whose committees have been investigating the Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday they have found evidence of delays created by the IRS Chief Counsel office in the screening of applications for tax-exempt status by Tea Party groups.

The unthinkable happened to me. My office was burglarized and a computer stolen containing all of my clients’ personal information! This is my cautionary tale to my colleagues—we have become targets in the IRS identity theft epidemic.

The Internal Revenue Service told its employees and the union representing them Tuesday that it has taken various budget-related steps that will enable the IRS it to cancel the next planned unpaid furlough day for employees on Monday, July 22.

The American Institute of CPAs has written a letter to members of Congress to support legislation that would block the U.S. Department of Labor’s 2010 proposal to change its definition of fiduciary under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 to include appraisers of employee stock ownership plans.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, is looking into findings from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration that the confidential tax records of political donors or candidates have been inappropriately accessed or disclosed in several instances since 2006 and why the Justice Department has declined to prosecute the perpetrators.

The Internal Revenue Service alerted taxpayers and tax professionals in an email Friday about an interest calculation error on certain notices mailed the weeks of July 1 and July 8.

The Internal Revenue Service said in an email to tax professionals Friday that it would begin sending letters to enrolled agents in late July when their enrollment status is being inactivated or terminated because of their failure to renew.

Thomson Reuters has released the 2013 edition of its annual Tax Planning Guide.

House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., contended that the immigration reform bill approved by the Senate last month violates the Constitution because it contains revenue provisions that are supposed to originate in the House.

A man from the Houston area who was arrested late last month at an airport while attempting to flee the country was indicted Friday in the Central District of California in what authorities allege is a multimillion dollar identity theft and tax refund fraud scheme involving more than 300 victims.