Finance

New York State has suspended Deloitte Financial Advisory Services from consulting work on financial institutions regulated by the state’s Department of Financial Services, and the firm has agreed to make a $10 million payment to the state as a result of problems with Deloitte FAS’s consulting work for Standard Chartered bank.

World leaders at the G8 Summit meeting in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland, issued a declaration Tuesday calling for countries to share tax information and increase transparency to discourage tax evasion, and President Obama released an action plan for identifying actual company ownership.

Congressman Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, has introduced legislation that would direct the Treasury Department to issue a legislative proposal to Congress concerning the viability of replacing the current income tax with a consumption tax.

Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., have introduced legislation aimed at allowing Enrolled Agents to present themselves as such and tout their credential wherever they practice.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing Thursday to examine corporate tax reform and the impact of offshore tax havens on base erosion and profit shifting by multinationals.

Leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have sent a letter to Internal Revenue Service acting chief Daniel Werfel requesting information about a March 2011 IRS search and seizure of as many as 60 million medical records from a California health care provider.

Senators Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., have introduced a bipartisan bill to make the New Markets Tax Credit program permanent and increase its annual allocation.

The Swiss and U.S. governments have signed a memorandum of understanding on interpretations of their agreement on implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA.

The Internal Revenue Service, under a congressional microscope for conference spending and improper scrutiny of small-government groups, has fired fewer workers for misconduct this year than at any time since 2002.

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, D-Md., the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has sent a letter to committee chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., urging him to stop making unsubstantiated allegations about the IRS Tea Party targeting scandal being traced back to the White House.

The House Ways and Means Committee plans to hold a hearing next Thursday on the use of tax havens by multinational corporations to shift their profits.

The unemployment rate rose a tenth of a percentage point to 7.6 percent in May as employers added 175,000 jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The Internal Revenue Service executive who portrayed Spock in the agency’s Star Trek video parody apologized to lawmakers for inappropriate spending on a $4.1 million conference in 2010.

A partisan divide is developing on how U.S. lawmakers view Internal Revenue Service actions, with Republicans seeing intimidation of their allies and Democrats citing agency mistakes and mismanagement.

Acting Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Danny Werfel told lawmakers he is working to restore trust in the beleaguered U.S. tax agency and said he wants to make improvements before pressing for a bigger budget.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has suspended trading in 61 microcap shell companies in an effort to prevent stock fraud, in the second largest trading suspension in the history of the SEC.

The chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Darrell Issa, R-Calif., revealed new testimony from IRS employees in Cincinnati who were purportedly involved with the IRS’s screening of Tea Party groups and conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status.

If the number of congressional hearings on tax reform this year is an indication of the potential for passage, it seems possible that something may actually be in the works.

The Internal Revenue Service does not have enough data to identify who claims a tax expenditure and how much they claim, for nearly half the dollar value of all tax expenditures, or $492 billion out of $1 trillion, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office.

An advocacy group has filed a lawsuit in a Washington, D.C., federal court on behalf of 25 Tea Party and conservative organizations against the Internal Revenue Service and top IRS officials, in addition to the U.S. Attorney General and Treasury Secretary, and Internal Revenue Service, arguing that the Obama administration overstepped its authority in subjecting applications for tax-exempt status from Tea Party groups to extra scrutiny.