Tax practice

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it would stop its examinations of donors to tax-exempt 501(c)(4) political organizations asking whether they had paid gift taxes, after the agency came under pressure from Republican lawmakers.

President Obama took to Twitter for the White House’s first-ever Twitter Town Hall, answering questions from his “tweeps” about taxes, the economy and other subjects.

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that parents may be able to qualify for a tax credit to help defray the added expenses of summer day camp for their children.

President Barack Obama plans to meet with congressional leaders on Thursday to try to strike an agreement on raising the debt ceiling through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases.

The Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with the Millennium Multiple Employer Welfare Benefit Plan, which went bankrupt last year.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., offered 18 proposals to cut $1.29 trillion from the federal budget deficit over 10 years, including closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating special tax breaks for wealthy Americans and big companies.

President Obama used his weekly address to say it was necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy to help close the budget deficit.

An inmate in a New Jersey prison has pleaded guilty to scamming the Internal Revenue Service out of nearly $215,000 by recruiting his fellow prisoners and filing false tax returns for them.

A New York accounting firm employee has admitted to defrauding clients of a payroll services company out of more than $3 million in tax money.

The Internal Revenue Service has selected 33 companies as prime contractors to provide information technology services over a 10-yer period.

In March of this year, we devoted this column to the Internal Revenue Service's newly announced 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative for disclosing income from foreign accounts and assets. Key features of the program are an Aug. 31, 2011, deadline, an eight-year disclosure period, a maximum 25 percent penalty for failure to disclose, reduced 12.5 or 5 percent penalties in specified situations, and various documentation and disclosures required with the submission.

JACKSON HEWITT FILES CH. 11

Washington, D.C. - The Internal Revenue Service said in mid-June that approximately 275,000 organizations have automatically lost their tax-exempt status under the law because they did not file legally required annual reports for three consecutive years.

Meet the new IRS—the kinder, gentler IRS. It's an agency with processes that are fast becoming structured, streamlined—and strangely quiet.

IMGCAP(1)]Accountants, insurance professionals and others need to be careful that they don’t become what the IRS calls material advisors.

PDI Global, which is part of the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters, has released its 2011-2012 Tax Planning Guide.

The Federal Unemployment Tax Act surtax is set to expire Thursday after House Republicans refused to extend the 35-year-old “temporary” unemployment surtax.

After achieving its strongest e-filing tax season to date with more than 11 million tax returns transmitted through its ProSystem fx Tax and Global fx Tax compliance solutions, CCH has earned a 97-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal 1040 individual tax returns and a 98-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal business tax returns, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s Software Error Reject Code Report.

The Internal Revenue Service has become more adept at identifying retirement plans that may violate tax laws, according to a new government report.

President Obama took Republican lawmakers to task during a news conference Wednesday for inflexibly refusing to compromise on taxes as part of a deal to raise the debt limit.