Tax research

An Internal Revenue Service employee has pleaded guilty to illegally accessing the personal information of more than 200 celebrities and sports figures.

BDO Seidman reported that its annual revenue increased 11.9 percent to $659 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2008 from $589 million the previous fiscal year.

Senators Max Baucus, D-Mont. and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman and ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, announced they would introduce six new measures to curb offshore tax evasion. The steps include: * Lengthening the statute of limitations for prosecuting individuals who fail to file a foreign bank account report. * Clarifying IRS authority to enforce filing requirements for these reports. * Clarifying the information that must be included in these reports. * Requiring taxpayers to file the reports with their individual and corporate income tax returns. * Revising the definition of ownership to include beneficial ownership of a corporation. * Including the reports in the Tax Code section that causes the statute of limitations not to expire before three years after the taxpayer furnishes the required information. The announcement was made at a hearing to discuss the findings of the Government Accountability Office investigation into the Ugland House, a law firm's office building in the Cayman Islands and the registered home to thousands of corporations. "Plainly, there's a lot of financial activity in the Caymans," said Baucus. "There's a virtual feast going on down there. That has led to some crowded halls in the Ugland House. And up to half of those Ugland House tenants - around 9,000 entities - are Americans." The investigation into Ugland House is somewhat misguided, according to Daniel J. Mitchell, senior fellow at Cato Institute. "The implication is there can't be 10,000 businesses in this building, but where a company is registered has nothing to do with where they conduct business. Companies are registered in Delaware because they have very good corporate and tax law. No one will argue that it's not normal to go to a jurisdiction that is very well regulated and regarded and where the courts are honest, as in the Cayman Islands."

The House passed a bill aimed at shoring up the mortgage industry and preventing foreclosures after the president dropped his veto threat.

The Senate Finance Committee held a hearing on the use of offshore corporate tax shelters in the Cayman Islands, on the heels of hearings elsewhere in the Senate on individual tax havens in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

John Gimigliano, former senior tax counsel of the House Ways and Means Committee and staff director of the Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures, has joined KPMG.

Executive CPA leaders from 81 of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S. visited Capitol Hill to discuss some of the key legislative issues confronting the accounting profession.

H&R Block has named a new president and CEO, Russ Smyth, the former president of McDonald's Europe.

Rev. Al Sharpton and his National Action Network have settled tax charges with federal prosecutors and agreed to pay between $2 million and $9 million to the Internal Revenue Service.

Joe Francis, founder of the Girls Gone Wild video series, pleaded not guilty to two counts of federal tax evasion, saying he was being victimized by the Internal Revenue Service's whistleblower program.

A Senate subcommittee plans to release another blockbuster report on the use of foreign tax havens after the first reports caused repercussions both here and abroad.

The Internal Revenue Service said it plans to send a second set of information packages to an estimated 5.2 million retirees and disabled veterans who have not yet filed their tax returns in order to give them their economic stimulus payments.

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance has reportedly sent letters to 182,000 individual taxpayers asking them to justify the tax refunds they have requested.

More than 28 percent of large public companies are not fully meeting disclosure requirements for tax reserve estimates, according to a new report.

Consideration of any tax reform for small business must take into account the difficulties small-business owners face when deciding how to structure their business and comply with the Tax Code’s complex requirements, said Dewey Martin, a Hampden, Maine-based CPA.Martin, who testified at the recent hearings before the Senate Finance Committee on business entities and small-business tax reform, is a small-business owner himself, as well as an advisor to 200-plus small-business owners and chair of the Accounting Department at Husson College in Bangor, Maine.

The Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation Division increased its enforcement activities last fiscal year after they fell behind in fiscal 2006, according to a new report.

Swiss investment bank UBS plans to stop offering offshore banking to U.S. residents after the bank was questioned about its clients' tax avoidance practices at a Senate hearing.

Back-to-school shopping will be tax-free for a few days next month in 13 states and the District of Columbia, according to a report by CCH.

The proposed regulations on preparer penalties, released on June 17, are the latest iteration of rules that tax practitioners should consider carefully when recommending and executing tax strategies. Not heeding them can result in stiff penalties or, worse, the loss of the right to continue to practice tax law and serious damage to a firm’s reputation in the client community.The simple reality is that those responsible for recommending prospective tax strategies are almost always drawn back into the matter by the signing return preparer once the transaction is completed. They are asked about tax benefit matters what was intended and whether things turn out as expected. That after-the-fact advice is enough to subject the practitioner to the label “return preparer” for purposes of the preparer penalties.

Investment banking firm Duff & Phelps has entered into a global alliance with World Tax Service Alliance and acquired WTS's U.S. member, World Tax Service U.S., for an undisclosed sum.