Tax practice

The Internal Revenue Service announced that its special enrollment examination could be converted to a computer-based test as soon as this fall.

A court order will allow the Internal Revenue Service to ask PayPal, a money transfer service owned by eBay Inc., to turn over information on customers who might be evading taxes.

Tax Freedom Day will fall on April 26 this year, according to the Tax Foundation's annual calculation using the latest government data on income and taxes.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox announced that Wall Street fund lawyer Andrew "Buddy" Donohue will join the agency as the next director of the Division of Investment Management.

Taxware, a provider of transaction tax calculation and compliance solutions, has released its annual list of the "Top 10 Most Unusual U.S. Sales Tax Laws for 2006."

Tax research and software provider RIA has upgraded its proprietary Checkpoint service to include expansion of user access to BNA content, international standards and titles from sibling Thomson company PPC.

The Government Accountability Office gave a thumbs-up to the Internal Revenue Service's $11-billion budget request, saying that the agency appears to have recognized that throwing money at enforcement can only reduce the tax gap so much.

H.R. 5114, the Tax Return Choice Act of 2006, was introduced in the House and referred to the Ways and Means Committee.

The Internal Revenue Service is looking to fill six vacancies on its Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee beginning in September.

A federal judge upheld a 1976 ruling and ordered the Internal Revenue Service to release detailed statistics on how the agency enforces the nation's tax laws to Susan Long, a Syracuse University professor and co-director of the non profit research group, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

An analysis of the Internal Revenue Service's 2003 figures show that President Bush's tax cuts on investment income have had a major effect on citizens in the upper tax brackets.

Although the Internal Revenue Service is cajoling taxpayers to file their returns electronically -- in a move designed to save the Treasury billions of dollars -- at least one top IRS official copped to submitting her return on paper.

In a limited study, the Government Accountability Office said that paid tax-return preparers at 19 chain operations returned less-than-stellar service.

IRS MEMO SAYS CALIF. DOMESTIC PARTNERS MUST FILE SEPARATELY: Domestic partners in California must file their federal tax returns separately, despite a 2003 law that extended equal legal rights to registered same-sex couples in the state. A memo out of the Internal Revenue Service's Office of Chief Counsel cites case law from the 1930s and 1940s in which the Supreme Court ruled that community property laws can only be applied to husbands and wives.California is one of nine community property states and, since 1999, has extended certain legal rights of marriage to same-sex couples registered with the state. On Jan. 1, 2005, the state's Domestic Partner Rights and Responsibilities Act went into effect, providing domestic partners with the same rights as married spouses. The act removed a joint tax return provision that required partners to file separate state and federal returns. The IRS memo says that because the act does not "make an incident of marriage by the inveterate policy of the state," registered domestic partners in the state must report all of their income earned from the performance of their personal services.

The new Section 199 deduction, a boon to taxpayers who qualify, is anything but to the filers who are struggling with the new concepts, rules, exceptions and safe harbors of the legislation.The domestic production activities deduction, enacted as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004,went into effect for tax years beginning after 2004 and permits taxpayers to claim a deduction from taxable income attributable to domestic production activities.

The Energy Tax Incentives Act of 2005 created a number of new tax breaks for individuals, with respect to their homes and cars, and for businesses, with respect to their commercial buildings and the construction of homes and appliances.Throughout the act, there is extensive reliance on the promulgation by the Treasury of regulations to flesh out the criteria to qualify for the new tax breaks. With the Treasury and Internal Revenue Service also having been saddled with a lot of last-minute changes affecting the 2005 tax year filing season in the Gulf Zone Opportunity Act of 2005, guidance with an impact on the 2005 tax year had to take precedence.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced that it is taking measures to challenge the Internal Revenue Service's examination of the association's tax-exempt status.

A congressional panel has scrapped President Bush's proposed budget cuts for hospitals and other Medicare providers, but preserved the president's plan to slash spending levels.

For the past couple of weeks, I've kept running across blog entries referencing a cool graphical representation of how the federal government allocates tax dollars. I finally decided to check out the chart, which has been years in the making.

On-demand sales tax calculation services provider Avalara has launched AvaRates Now -- a free, map-enhanced tool that provides accurate rates for any North American location in real-time.