Tax practice

The American Institute of CPAs has written to Congress urging lawmakers to repeal the controversial new 1099 information reporting requirements in the health care reform bill.

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman said Tuesday the IRS has withdrawn its “John Doe” summonses against the Swiss bank UBS.

Charles Rangel, the former chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, abruptly departed a House ethics panel hearing on Monday, claiming that he could not afford to pay for legal counsel.

The Internal Revenue Service failed to ensure that only eligible taxpayers received education credit tax relief that was only supposed to be available to taxpayers in Midwestern disaster areas, according to a new government report.

In June we discussed the proposed Schedule UTP and instructions for reporting uncertain tax positions. The Internal Revenue Service received a number of comments on those proposals and, on Sept. 24, 2010, issued a final Schedule UTP and related materials for the 2010 year in Announcements 2010-75 and 2010-76. The final version makes a number of significant changes to the requirements in response to the input received.

IRS MAY PROBE FORGIVEN MORTGAGE DEBT

Washington, D.C. - The IRS plans to take a closer look at businesses that fail to file tax returns, and identify more of them.

The unfinished business awaiting Congress during the lame duck session this month includes the expiring 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, the normal extender items, the estate tax, and, many tax professionals believe, a ban on tax strategy patents.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., said Friday he would introduce legislation to repeal the controversial requirements for businesses to file forms that would report payments made for goods and certain services to the IRS.

Here’s some good news for those who haven’t renewed their Preparer Tax Identification Number by the end of the year. The process to renew it will be the same beginning in January as it is now, and it takes only about 15 minutes to do online.

Nearly 99 million individuals filed their federal income tax returns electronically during 2010, a 3 percent increase in the IRS e-file rate, mainly due to taxpayers who prepared and filed their own taxes from their home computers.

H&R Block released an update on its lawsuit against its refund anticipation loan provider, HSBC, saying the two have been “in discussions.”

Homeowners making energy-saving improvements this fall can cut their winter heating bills and lower their 2010 tax bill as well.

The bi-partisan panel appointed in February by PresidentObama and charged with reducing the mammoth U.S, deficit, has released a draftproposal calling for billions in spending cuts as well as overhauling the taxcode in an effort to cut U.S. debt down to 60 percent of GDP by 2024.

A bipartisan pair of U.S. senators has written to the co-chairmen of the federal deficit commission asking them to consider raising the gas tax to finance highway construction nationwide.

A bipartisan group of key congressional committee chairmen pledged to patch the alternative minimum tax this year and wrote to IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman telling him to plan for AMT relief.

President Obama and congressional Republicans are laying out their positions more openly on the fate of the expiring Bush tax cuts as they prepare for negotiations later this month.

Individuals inappropriately received at least $380million in personal tax exemptions and tax credits in 2007 as a result of themultiple use of Taxpayer Identification Numbers according to a new reportreleased from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration.

CCH has introduced CCH Mobile, a mobile application that extends CCH’s IntelliConnect tax research service to the RIM BlackBerry and Apple iPhone, at its user conference in Orlando on Monday.

An Internal Revenue Service employee has been indicted for embezzling nearly $4,000 in taxpayer payments to the IRS.