Tax practice

A federal judge has permanently barred eight men — including two CPAs and five tax preparers — from promoting an alleged tax fraud scheme involving bogus income tax credits based on fictitious methane production at landfills.

The IRS recently issued a revenue procedure to help companies that don’t want to claim the 50 percent depreciation deduction on new property included in the stimulus bill.

Washington, D.C. — A new IRS revenue procedure offers reliance criteria for private foundations and sponsoring organizations that maintain donor-advised funds to use in determining whether a potential grantee qualifies as a public charity.

The IRS needs to create a plan to comprehensively evaluate the administration of civil tax penalties and their impact on voluntary compliance, recommended a new report from the Government Accountability Office.

H&R Block is stepping up its tax audit support services as the tax prep chain sees the IRS audit rate doubling.

In the classic 1935 Marx Brothers film, A Night at theOpera, Otis B. Driftwood is seen explaining the finer points of a contract inlegalese that the Italian, Fiorello, doesn't quite understand.

A federal grand jury has returned an 11-count indictment charging four Salt Lake City residents with conspiring to conceal profits stemming from their mergers and acquisition business from the IRS and under-reporting or not reporting income over a span of approximately seven years.

Eleven defendants have been charged in a massive scheme to file fraudulent tax returns using the stolen identities of Puerto Rican residents in an attempt to collect more than $18 million in tax refunds.

New Jersey Governor John Corzine must be breathing a sigh of relief now that his state has recovered over $625 million from a tax amnesty program.

Harriette Walters, the former tax office manager for the District of Columbia, was sentenced to 17 and a half years in prison for masterminding a tax scam estimated to have cost the district $48.1 million.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson plans to make oversight of tax return preparers one of her office’s main priorities in the coming fiscal year.

The IRS has excluded pay-for-performance success payments made under the federal government’s new Home Affordable Modification Program from counting as income.

Victims of recent storms in Alabama and Missouri and wildfires in Oklahoma may qualify for tax relief from the IRS.

A UBS client and chartered accountant has pleaded guilty to filing a false tax return for his 2004 taxes in the latest sign of the IRS’s stepped-up enforcement efforts against the Swiss bank’s U.S. customers.

A new analysis by a former high-ranking IRS official explains how the Tax Code’s corporate reorganization provisions afford tax-free treatment to certain corporate combinations and realignments.

The IRS often fails to send notices of federal tax liens to taxpayer representatives such as accountants, according to a new report.

The Internal Revenue Service has extended the deadline for filing a report on foreign bank accounts to Sept. 23 from the original June 30 deadline as it seeks to crack down on offshore tax havens.

The IRS has not been doing an adequate job of overseeing the acceptance agents who assign Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers to foreign nationals, increasing the risk of tax fraud.

Typical end-of-year tax planning will be on everyone’s minds before you know it.

An IRS advisory committee has recommended that the IRS require all tax preparers who file at least 200 returns a year to use electronic filing.