Practice Management

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has released a report outlining her office’s priorities over the coming fiscal year, including improving Internal Revenue Service procedures to protect victims of tax-related identity theft and helping people who have lost their homes to foreclosure.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued a new revenue procedure that aims to clear up some of the murkiness surrounding subprime loans and the tax treatment of securitized versions of those loans, though the murkiness is likely to remain for the majority of those loans anyway.

Accounting firm Weaver and Tidwell reported that its net revenues for the 2008 fiscal year ending May 31 reached $51 million, a 28 percent increase over the previous fiscal year.

Illinois accounting firms Sikich LLP and Millikin Benning Kleckler & Kobischka have combined forces.

Accounting firm Reznick Group has partnered with Palladium Pacific on a service to provide help to real estate lenders, investors, builders and developers with their troubled real estate assets.

The AICPA 2008 Succession Survey, as you would expect, has a great deal of information about the current state of succession at multi-owner firms and recommended best practices for those firms. What will come as a surprise to some is there is an equivalent amount of information, observation of trends, and recommended best practices for the sole practitioner.

Since most observers consider the tax prep market to be in a maturing mode, it’s important for software makers to offer their products for tryouts, early renewals and promotional pricing during the season when their customers have the time to experiment.And that time, of course, is now.

In a high-profile consolidation in the not-for-profit software arena, NFP vendor Blackbaud struck a deal to acquire struggling rival Kintera for roughly $46 million in cash, or $1.12 per share.The deal, which Blackbaud plans to finance with cash and its credit facility, was expected to close July 2.

2009 HSA LIMITS RELEASEDWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has published the 2009 inflation-adjusted deduction limits for health savings accounts.

So far, 2008 has not been a year for major tax legislation.Nor, being an election year, are the remaining six months likely to offer major legislation. Two bills that did make it through Congress prior to Memorial Day included tax provisions focused on farmers and alternative energy and on military personnel and veterans. The farm legislation required the override of a presidential veto and included a procedural snafu where one of the non-tax titles of the legislation was not forwarded to President Bush along with the rest of the legislation. Barring any litigation over that issue, the enactment date of the legislation is May 22, 2008.