Tax research

Actor Wesley Snipes has asked a Florida judge to allow him permission to temporarily leave the U.S. to complete work on two of his movies while his tax conviction is being appealed.

A committee of tax experts delivered an annual report to Congress recommending improvements in the IRS's Web and electronic filing services, including one suggestion that would punish tax preparers who don't file individual returns electronically.

A former Internal Revenue Service agent has pleaded guilty to soliciting a $5,000 bribe from a small business he was auditing.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that tax rebate checks and economic stimulus payments have boosted personal income, disposable income and personal consumption expenditures significantly since April.

The Senate Finance Committee held hearings on reforming international tax rules, looking at the ways the federal government taxes the foreign income of U.S. taxpayers and businesses.

The Internal Revenue Service has reversed itself on the rolling-average method of valuing inventory and will now consider it valid for tax purposes.

The prison sentences of a father-and-son pair of former cable television executives have been reduced by three years after an appeals court dismissed one of the two bank fraud counts for which they were convicted.

A study by Grant Thornton found that only 843 U.S. corporations out of nearly 10,000 took advantage of a one-time dividend deduction that rewarded them for repatriating their foreign profits, giving them deductions totaling $265 billion.

The House passed a bill promising relief for another year from the spread of the alternative minimum tax, but the bill already faces opposition from the White House.

The House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee held hearings on bills that would encourage employers to automatically enroll their employees in individual retirement account plans.

The Internal Revenue Service should make several changes in its electronic filing system to address concerns raised by the American Institute of CPAs and others, according to two new reports.

A Russian appeals court has given PricewaterhouseCoopers' Russian firm the right to appeal a tax evasion case involving the firm's audits of the bankrupt Yukos oil company.

Vertex has acquired Levyti Consulting's Global Tax Office software and plans to market the product with its own global income tax and compliance systems.

More than 27,000 health care providers who were paid by Medicare had unpaid payroll and other federal tax debts totaling over $2 billion in 2006, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office.

The Internal Revenue Service is trying to cope with rising gas prices by increasing the optional standard mileage rates that taxpayers can use to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile.

The late comedian George Carlin had a $3 million tax debt that took him about two decades to pay off, but he credited the debt with keeping him working as a comic.

The Internal Revenue Service has waived some limitations of the low-income housing tax credit in Indiana and Iowa so that owners of facilities in these states can provide housing to victims of recent storms and flooding.

Questions about economic stimulus payments and tax rebates kept the phones buzzing at Internal Revenue Service offices and cost the IRS a considerable chunk of its budget.

Calculations of economic stimulus payments by the Internal Revenue Service may have been wrong in nearly 400,000 cases.

The Internal Revenue Service said that about 5.2 million retirees and disabled veterans who qualify for economic stimulus payments have not filed to claim the payments.