Practice Management

In a media blitz last October, the billionaire investor Carl Icahn pledged to create a $150 million political organization to muscle an overhaul of the corporate tax code through a gridlocked Congress.

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

Although a recent ABC News/Washington Post Poll found just 6 percent of voters who lean Republican and 4 percent of those who lean Democrat rank taxes as the most important issue impacting their vote, one in five public company tax directors feel differently.

Nearly a quarter of Americans think it’s acceptable to lie to the Internal Revenue Service about under-the-table income.

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration is pursuing fraudsters posing as IRS agents who call to harass taxpayers about fictitious tax debts, calling them back to warn them about their criminal activity and getting the phone company to shut them down.

The American Institute of CPAs is crying foul over an ad by H&R Block suggesting that many CPAs don’t know how to prepare tax returns, but Block is promising to increase its competition with CPAs.

The House Ways and Means Committee passed a package of three bills Wednesday designed to save money for the federal government, including one that requires taxpayers claiming the Child Tax Credit to provide a Social Security number for the child to prevent undocumented immigrants from qualifying.

Business software giant SAP has been going beyond its traditional enterprise resource planning specialty to expand into areas such as supply chain management, travel and expense management, and the Internet of Things.

With a 400 percent surge in reported phone and email phishing and malware schemes this tax season, the American Institute of CPAs is working with Congress, the Internal Revenue Service and its members to combat tax-related identity theft and tax return fraud.

The owner and operator of Grant Tax Service, a tax preparation business in Vineland, N.J., has been indicted by a federal grand jury on 18 counts of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false tax returns and five counts of filing false income tax returns.