Tax research

A federal court in Portland, Ore., sentenced a former Oregon chemical company executive to serve 18 months in prison and pay a $50,000 criminal fine following his conviction on two counts of filing false federal income tax returns.Trevor Smith, the former vice president of sales for Raisio Western North America, was convicted in March on charges of filing false returns for the 1999 and 2000 tax years. While employed at Raisio, federal prosecutors said that Smith received approximately $350,000 in kickback payments from the former general manager of Georgia-based Chemical Products Technologies. Those payments were related to Raisio’s purchases of a pulping additive used to increase pulp yield, and were not claimed by Smith on his returns.

The Supreme Court has ruled that only the U.S. Tax Court can review refusals by the Internal Revenue Service to reduce interest payments on people who underpay their taxes.

Internet tax research, once a novelty, is now the standard, with a number of publishers offering publications that are only available online."We still subscribe to some paper products, but using the Web-based versions is much more efficient," said Cindy Hockenberry, tax information analyst at the Appleton, Wis.-based National Association of Tax Professionals. "The transition in going from paper to online was not as difficult as we anticipated. Books are still useful where you know where a topic is that you researched before, but the search engines on the different platforms make up for that. And it's incredibly helpful to have immediate access to all the cross references that you might not have thought about."

GAO TO IRS: FORGET SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENTThe Government Accountability Office said that the Internal Revenue Service doesn't appear to be in a position to develop its own software for tax preparation anytime soon.

H&R Block Inc. announced that its new bank opened more than 2 million prepaid card bank accounts by the end of the 2007 tax season, doubling the company’s original projection.

The Internal Revenue Service is reportedly after Golden State Warriors owner Chris Cohan for some $160 million in back taxes.Cohan, a former cable television mogul, has been legally fighting with the agency for years over the 1998 sale of his former company, Sonic Communications.

The popularity of S corporations has skyrocketed, with the number of businesses opting for them rising from 725,000 in 1985 to more than 3 million, according to the most recent statistics.And that growth is well-deserved, according to Richard Thompson, of the CPA and business advisory firm Sikich LLP. "S corporations have become such an important business vehicle because taxpayers understand their extreme value," he said.

The recent release of the long-awaited final regs on nonqualified deferred compensation under Code Sec. 409A did not bring a much-hoped-for extension of the effective date for full implementation of the rules. The final regs - all 209 pages of them, and the 186 pages it took to explain the changes made or not made to the proposed regs - do not extend the transition relief for compliance beyond Dec. 31, 2007.That does not leave much time for compliance, let alone formulating tax strategies that take maximum advantage of the small leeway that the final regs provide to employers. Compensation plans drafted under the proposed regulations must be compared against the final regs. Decisions on whether a plan should be terminated must be made. Final plan designs must be drafted and adopted. And then an explanation of the terms of the compliant plan must be explained (and sold) to the key executives who the plan has been adopted to keep happy in the first place.

The Internal Revenue Service says that the changes it made to its whistleblower provisions last year are already beginning to pay off.According to a published report, since the law was enacted in December, offering much higher rewards in cases involving major tax cheating, the IRS has received about 20 reward claims -- some involving hundreds of million of dollars in alleged fraud.

The 2008 Low Income Taxpayer Clinic grant application process is now open.

The 2007 tax filing season set a number of records at the Internal Revenue Service -- highlighted by the more than 76 million electronically filed individual tax returns and more than 140 million visits to the IRS Web site.

Rankings can be very subjective, but they are still captivating. Everyone has an opinion of what they think is the best movie or song. As a Baby Boomer, I remember for years listening to a local station’s Top 500 classic rock and roll rankings to see if “In the Still of The Night,” was still ranked No 1.

A federal court in Chicago has barred Neal and Royanne Reddy and their corporation, Royanne & Co. Inc., from preparing tax returns, the Justice Department announced.The court found that the Reddys, whose business offices are in Marseilles and Princeton, Ill., prepared more than 15,000 tax returns between 2002 and 2005.

Churches, charities and other tax-exempt organizations that paid the federal excise tax on long-distance or bundled telephone service qualify for this year’s one-time telephone excise tax refund, according to the Internal Revenue Service.

The Internal Revenue Service has identified a significant refund scheme involving hundreds of people living in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands.According to the agency, many nonresidents and locals of the islands filed income tax returns requesting refund checks including the earned income tax credit. But CNMI residents are not required to file a return with the IRS and are not eligible to claim the credit.

The Government Accountability Office wants to see better descriptions and more cost and expected performance information on the Internal Revenue Service’s new initiatives in the agency’s future budget submissions.The IRS’s budget request for 2008 includes a spending increase of almost 5 percent, to $11.6 billion, and the GAO noted that the agency’s budget proposes shifting a greater proportion of spending to enforcement, continuing a trend.

Embarrassingly for Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, one of the loudest proponents of reducing the tax gap, two mistakes he made in recent years on his own property taxes have recently come to light.A political ad sponsored by the Montana Republican State Central Committee has brought to light local property taxes in both Washington and Montana that tripped up Baucus, D-Mont.

The Treasury Department issued rules last week aimed at dismissing some of the uncertainties around Roth 401(k) plans.

The Internal Revenue Service announced that while the phase-out of the tax credit for Toyota and Lexus hybrids continues, General Motors Corp. and Nissan hybrids still qualify for the full credit.

Practitioners considering making an offer in compromise to the Internal Revenue Service on behalf of a client are faced with significant changes to the program. While negotiating an OIC has not been an option for most taxpayers, the changes in several key features mean that it will no longer be a feasible option for some.Topping those new OIC guidelines is a rule in which taxpayers filing a lump-sum offer must pay a non-refundable deposit of 20 percent of the offer amount with the application.