Tax research

Ernst & Young has been named by a law firm that has filed a submission with the Internal Revenue Service's Whistleblower Office, claiming that one of the accounting firm's Fortune 500 clients improperly reduced its taxes by $1 billion through a series of transactions.

The Internal Revenue Service is not doing a good job of managing its paper case files, according to a newly released report.

A high-ranking Treasury Department official has warned of the costs of tax-exempt bond financing for projects such as sports stadiums.

Republican presidential candidates debated their tax-lowering credentials at an event sponsored by CNBC, MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday evening.

The Internal Revenue Service has given businesses a simpler process for requesting relief for late elections.

The KPMG tax shelter case got underway with jury selection and a drastically reduced set of defendants.

The push to raise taxes on hedge funds, private equity firms and their managers seems to have stalled for this year in Congress.

Jackson Hewitt Tax Service has ousted chairman and chief executive Michael Lister after more than 125 of the company's franchises faced charges of fraudulent tax return preparation.

The House of Representatives has passed a bill that would provide relief to homeowners facing the threat of taxes on their foreclosed homes in the midst of the subprime mortgage meltdown.

Grand Rapids, Mich. - A federal grand jury has indicted three tax shelter promoters, charging them with conspiring to promote, market and sell fraudulent tax shelters.

GOVERNMENT OWES $45M IN EMPLOYMENT TAXESWASHINGTON, D.C. - The federal government is itself a tax delinquent, owing approximately $45 million in employment taxes, according to a report from a Treasury Department watchdog.

The Internal Revenue Service has lost the first round in a much-anticipated test case against Textron Inc., in which it sought judicial approval for a new program seeking tax accrual workpapers during the examination of corporate clients.The IRS is interested in Textron's and others' workpapers, since they document what the company considers its questionable tax positions.

The Internal Revenue Service is not doing enough to match incorrect or missing identification numbers on income and wage statements with existing tax accounts, charged the Treasury Inspector General for Tax AdministrationThe TIGTA noted that in tax year 2004 alone, the IRS received about 3.8 million income statements reporting approximately $150 billion in earnings that could not be matched to a filed tax return because of missing or erroneous ID numbers. Compared to 2001, that represented a 63 percent increase.

In a vote that may have a wide-ranging effect on the accounting profession, House lawmakers voted 220-175 to overhaul patent rules and place a ban on tax-planning-method patents.HR 1908, the Patent Reform Act of 2007, primarily contains provisions that would make it harder to get patents and harder for companies to be sued for patent infringement. However, it also contains a provision that would protect accounting firms from lawsuits over tax-planning methods.

The deadline for compliance with final Section 409A regulations, scheduled for Dec. 31, 2007, should be extended for a year, according to 92 of the largest law firms in the nation.The new regulations, finalized in April, require deferred-compensation plans to be amended to comply with the Internal Revenue Code.

The last few months have seen the problems in sub-prime lending start to have a national and even international impact on the credit and stock markets.The combination of expanded sub-prime lending programs with mortgage rates that adjust upward after two to five years, reduced or eliminated down-payment requirements, and a housing market that has seen real estate prices actually decline in many markets, has left many marginal borrowers unable to pay higher monthly mortgage payments, unable to refinance to more traditional mortgages, and unable to sell homes at a price sufficient to cover the mortgage obligation.

The Internal Revenue Service has seen a 60 percent increase so far this year in electronic filing of tax returns by small businesses and large corporations.

Three Democratic congressmen have announced plans to draft legislation that would impose a war surtax to pay for operations in Iraq as a way to demonstrate their opposition to the war.

Tax technology vendor Vertex said it planned a major hiring initiative that would double the size of its consulting group over the next six months.

A report by the Treasury Department's inspector general raised concerns about the screening done by the Internal Revenue Service of electronic filing providers.