Tax practice

The Internal Revenue Service has set Wednesday, Sept. 2, as the second date in a series of public forums to discuss performance standards for tax preparers.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman has been chosen as the new chairman of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Forum on Tax Administration.

IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman has been chosen as the new chairman of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Forum on Tax Administration.

A federal court in Seattle has permanently barred a prison inmate from promoting a tax avoidance scheme that attracted over 44,000 customers and earned over $50 million.

A California man has agreed to plead guilty to a scheme to move over $1 million into secret Swiss bank accounts at UBS via a fake business the bank helped him set up in Hong Kong.

With trillion-dollar deficits, cap-and-trade and nationalized health care on the horizon, the issues involving the possible registering and licensing of tax preparers seem trivial. Yet the ability to fund the deficits and pay for a nationalized health care system ultimately depends on the ability of the federal government to collect tax.

In a decision that could have major implications for accountant work-product privileges, a federal appeals court has reversed a lower court decision and ordered aerospace and defense contractor Textron to hand over tax accrual work papers to the IRS as part of an investigation of tax shelters.

The Treasury and Energy Departments plan to give $2.3 billion in tax credits from the Recovery Act to manufacturers of clean energy equipment.

The U.S. and Swiss governments have reached an agreement on a lawsuit in which the IRS had been seeking the identities of the U.S. taxpayers behind 52,000 secret accounts at the Swiss bank UBS.

For its final pièce-de-résistance, the Treasury Department has sent the last component of its financial regulatory reform legislative onslaught to Capitol Hill, even though lawmakers have supposedly gone home for recess.

Intuit has introduced Intuit ProLine Tax Research, powered by BNA, a Web-based service that integrates directly with Intuit’s Lacerte and ProSeries professional tax software.

A retired IRS agent who worked for a company that claimed to cut customers’ taxes has been sentenced to nearly four years in prison for taking part in a tax fraud scheme.

IMGCAP(1)]The IRS is increasing its audit activity involving payments to foreign persons and U.S. taxpayers’ offshore financial accounts.

A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit charging the IRS with depriving taxpayers of billions of dollars in refunds on long-distance telephone excise taxes.

A report from the Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration recommends that the IRS adopt a centralized approach to crack down on fraud at nonprofit organizations.

The Internal Revenue Service has extended the filing deadline yet again for people to report on foreign tax accounts, giving them until June 30 of next year, but only under certain circumstances.

Tax preparer David Canales was arraigned in a San Diego federal court on an 18-count indictment charging him with mail fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion after he created checking accounts named after the IRS and the California Franchise Tax Board.

A former Chicago rabbi and nine others were charged in a $35 million tax fraud conspiracy, accused of filing 3,300 false tax returns in the names of federal prison inmates.

Is your firm currently managing workflow through a combination of spreadsheets and Microsoft Outlook? Are you mailing CDs or, worse yet, paper?

1. What do you see as the main lesson of last tax season?