Tax practice

The Internal Revenue Service has issued new rules for travel, lodging, meals and other expenses, including an optional method for computing the deductible costs.

The House Committee on Small Business held a hearing on how some expiring tax incentives, such as the research and development credit and clean energy incentives, would affect small businesses.

The Internal Revenue Service has provided guidance for retirement plan administrators, plan participants and retirees on some recent changes from legislation affecting required minimum distributions.

The Justice Department has asked a federal court in Lincoln, Neb., to bar Donald Ondrak, a Lexington, Neb., CPA, from preparing tax returns.

An outside audit has revealed that the Securities and Exchange Commission's record-keeping system of contracts with outside vendors is riddled with "significant risk areas" within the regulator's acquisitions office.

The Pentagon's Defense Contract Audit Agency - thefederal watchdog responsible for providing critical accounting and auditingoversight of military contractors - is riddled with audit quality problems thatinclude inadequate audit planning and supervision, as well as serious breachesof auditor independence, congressional investigators charged.

A New Jersey man has pleaded guilty to failing to report $6.1 million that he had hidden in secret Swiss bank accounts.

The Internal Revenue Service has agreed to extend until the end of the year a grace period for collecting penalties from small businesses accused of engaging in certain types of tax shelters.

Among the revenue proposals detailed in the administration’s fiscal 2010 budget are some provisions that might negatively affect small businesses and tax preparers. The American Institute of CPAs has weighed in on a number of these, including the codification of the economic substance doctrine, information reporting on payments to corporations, increasing the level of the information penalties, and expanding the requirement for electronic filing by return preparers.

The Internal Revenue Service has severed ties with ACORN, the controversial community-organizing group that was recently the subject of a series of hidden camera videos.

A California tax preparer who falsely claimed to be a CPA and former IRS employee could receive up to six years in prison after he pleaded guilty this week to aiding and assisting others in preparing false tax returns.

New Jersey ranks at the bottom of the list in a new study of the comparative business friendliness of tax systems in the 50 states, while South Dakota is counted as most business friendly.

The Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration has released a report recommending that the IRS seek mandatory electronic filing of individual tax returns by paid preparers, and legislation is being readied to write such a requirement into law.

IMGCAP(1)]Remember when the hefty three-ringed tax research guides required a whole room set aside as a library? Oh, and a librarian? Imagine justifying this expense to your partners today. You couldn’t. You wouldn’t want to because the alternative is so much better than the dark woodsy library ever was.

The State of Minnesota has decided to end its income tax reciprocity program with Wisconsin, effective Jan. 1, 2010.

Year-end tax planning for 2009 presents a unique set of challenges, in addition to reprising some traditional ones. Many more tax breaks this year are temporary, either sunsetting in 2009 or 2010. Congress, in 11th-hour brinkmanship, is not helping to signal in advance which provisions will be extended. Further, the conventional tax advice of accelerating deductions and deferring income may not sit well if deferring income runs the risk of not receiving it at all in an uncertain economy ... or receiving it when tax rates go higher.

Textron ruling may put limits on practitioner privilege

IRS TO ASSIGN CORPORATE AUDITORS TO SWISS BANK CASES

The Internal Revenue Service has again extended the deadline for taxpayers to make voluntary disclosures of the unreported income they have stashed in hidden offshore accounts, but warned this would be the final extension.

A man who had been barred five years ago from preparing tax returns and representing clients before the IRS was convicted of violating the injunction by continuing to do so.