In the Blogs: Notice Anything?

Highlights of some of our favorite tax-related blogs from the past week.

Notice anything?

  • H&R Block blog: What to tell your client about that IRS notice he or she just got before he or she jumps.
  • Taxable Talk: When a client with a job gets a notice of federal self-employment tax due. The kernel of wisdom: “Two-thirds of IRS notices are wrong in whole or in part. Yet the IRS keeps sending them out for a simple reason: People pay them blindly.”
  • Taxing Subjects: On the upside, “IRS Says Security Summit Yields Positive Results.” They’ll be sending out notices on the get-together soon.
  • TaxMama: Potential pitfalls and tax tangles from poorly assembled S corps or LLCs. This week’s second kernel of wisdom: “These days, the IRS is not wasting time on unprofitable audits … And when it comes to profitable S corporations, the IRS knows that the probability of generating additional taxes is 100 percent.”

In with the new

  • Taxjar: Seems we're just used to those little gold squares on the end of our plastic, and how now at CVS you have to slide the end of your card into the little slot at the bottom of the thing with the impossible angle to get right. Anyway, “New Payment Technologies: What’s Coming Next After Chip Cards?”
  • Summing It Up: A key note that under the Surface Transportation and Veterans Health Care Choice Improvement Act of 2015, FBAR filings due in 2017 (for the 2016 FBAR) will be due April 15.
  • The Income Tax School: How scammers and ID thieves have captured the Tax Version of John Dillinger Award from the IRS, supplanting even tax evaders. That takes some crooked doing.

On the jobs

  • Procedurally Taxing: Last installment of Lavar Taylor’s three-part post on SECC v Commissioner, now a foundational case in understanding the Tax Court’s jurisdiction to hear employment tax disputes.
  • TurboTax: What to remind them about if they’re starting their own business. First of all, that’s “business” and not “hobby.” Second, “Choose your business entity carefully.”
  • BNA blogs: The apparent lure of stock-based compensation.

The ‘fun’ in ‘public funding’

  • Mauled Again: Sometimes there’s simply no way around a pothole except using taxes to pay the road crew and buy the mound of asphalt. Simply no way.
  • Tax Vox: Now Our Optic Receptors Have Processed All Available Information Dept.” “Exxon, Yes Exxon, Backs a Carbon Tax” looks at a recent WSJ story on how the oil goliath stands to forever alter the politics of carbon taxes.
  • Tax Policy: Blogger Alan Cole examines how one of the most important provisions in the new House GOP tax plan is the disallowance of the business deduction for net interest expense.” True, not everyday stuff for most taxpayers, but “important for the way businesses are run and financed.”

Gone Fourth

  • Don’t Mess With Taxes: When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to grill on a national summer holiday celebrating independence, said people will often turn to hot dogs, hamburgers and stuff from the food store. What states tax groceries or take-out meals?
  • Musings of a Burbank CPA: A look at U.S. presidents who were either born or died on the 4th of July: Coolidge, Monroe, John Adams and Jefferson. He wasn’t an American, a president or real, but Horatio Hornblower was also born on the 7/4.
  • The Wandering Tax Pro: Trump, the truth and our duty.

New to us

  • Dinesen Tax Times: “As a Licensed Public Accountant with my nose constantly in tax law and tax publications, I admit to being a bit of a tax nerd…” Welcome to LPA and EA Jason T. Dinesen, who addresses whether an S Corp must pay salary if the owner takes no money out of the business.
For reprint and licensing requests for this article, click here.
Tax practice Tax tools Tax franchises
MORE FROM ACCOUNTING TODAY