Tax practice

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.

The majority owner of an accounting firm in Montvale, N.J., was sentenced Wednesday to six months in prison and six months of home confinement for failing to pay the IRS taxes that the firm withheld from its employees’ wages.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson told Congress that proposed budget cuts for the Internal Revenue Service could reduce taxpayer service and compliance.

The complexity of the federal Tax Code can engender errors and underpaid taxes, according to a new government study.

U.S.-based multinational corporations and their lobbyists are pushing hard for a so-called “tax holiday” that would repatriate the earnings from their foreign subsidiaries, arguing that it would inject up to $1 trillion into the U.S. economy, but the prospects for job growth are murky at best.

The National Society of Accountants has created a new social network for tax preparers.

California Governor Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers have struck a deal to close the state’s estimated $15 billion budget deficit, including provisions to force online retailers like Amazon.com to collect sales tax from customers.

A former client of the Swiss banks UBS AG and Wegelin & Co. has pleaded guilty to personal income tax evasion for hiding more than $26.4 million in secret bank accounts.

The Internal Revenue Service is reminding anyone who has a bank account or other financial account in a foreign country, or who has signature authority over such an account, that they may be required to report the account to the U.S. Department of the Treasury by June 30 each year.

Governments around the world are either increasing indirect taxes such as value-added taxes or introducing them for the first time.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued final regulations shortening the automatic extension time period for partnership, trust and estate tax returns from six to five months, meaning the returns are due Sept. 15.