Practice Management

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Congress should stop dithering on passing a fix for the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Because of the thousands upon thousands of press releases that I have seen, very few impress or take me by surprise. But the one at www.healthsouth.com/who_we_are/press_releases.asp did just that. In the release, HealthSouth Corporation announced that it has received a $440 million tax recovery from the IRS “for overstatements of taxable income attributable to financial fraud perpetrated by members of prior management.” This recovery includes a $296 million tax refund for the tax years 1996 through 1999, and $144 million of associated interest income.

IRS OFFERS FORECLOSURE VICTIMS ADVICEWashington, D.C. - The Internal Revenue Service is reaching out to former homeowners who have suffered foreclosure and now are being hit with taxes on any money they were forgiven on their mortgages.

With 2008 little more than two months away, tax practitioners finally have their clients' attention on the need for year-end tax planning.As in prior years, year-end 2007 presents unique tax planning challenges, as well as traditional opportunities. Especially this year, sunset provisions, phase-ins and phase-outs, and inflation adjustments, as well as retroactive and prospective legislative changes and deadlines set in final regulations, all contribute to chasing a moving target.

You may well ask, where did I find a title like this? I doubt that you have ever wondered what Sir Isaac Newton has to do with running a CPA firm - or, for that matter, any business.While everyone knows Newton as the discoverer of gravity, it's really his three laws concerning the behavior of moving objectives that are meaningful today. Even though these laws were defined 320 years ago, they can help explain the behavior of some of your partners today. His laws of motion apply to physical entities operating in space, and describe how these entities interact. However, they can just as easily be applied to human entities interacting in an environment of workplace change.

The Internal Revenue Service reiterated its demand for casinos and other poker tournament sponsors to begin reporting winnings of more than $5,000 after March 4, 2008.

The Internal Revenue Service position on Circular 230 monetary penalties has generated concern and comments from the American Institute of CPAs, while the American Bar Association Tax Section intends to submit its own comments on the matter.The penalties were announced in Notice 2007-39 earlier this year to implement Section 822 of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which expanded the sanctions that the IRS can impose for certain prohibited conduct to include monetary penalties.

The Internal Revenue Service said that personal exemptions and standard deductions would rise and tax brackets would widen as it adjusted a variety of tax provisions for 2008 to keep pace with inflation.

The Internal Revenue Service said that Form 1120-A, U.S. Corporation Short-Form Income Tax Return, is now obsolete.

Grant Thornton, the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, posted a 12 percent rise in fiscal 2007 revenues to reach $1.036 billion.