Finance

House Republicans have passed the budget plan introduced by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for fiscal year 2014, which shrinks the number of tax brackets to two brackets of 10 and 25 percent.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee is calling on the Internal Revenue Service to provide a detailed accounting of how much taxpayer money will be used to implement the health care reform law and many IRS employees will be needed to work on it.

An influential lawmaker on Congress’s tax writing committee is calling on the Internal Revenue Service to release a copy of video parodies it shot of Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. needs to win back public trust after losses on a derivative portfolio swelled to more than $6.2 billion and eroded confidence in the largest U.S. bank, a company risk manager told lawmakers.

A top official at the U.S. Small Business Administration prodded lawmakers at a congressional hearing to extend a debt refinancing program that provided a lifeline to thousands of struggling small businesses before expiring last year.

New York City officials are urging low-income and middle-class taxpayers to file their tax returns for free or low cost to claim their tax credits with one month to go in tax season, while cracking down on tax preparers.

The Tax Policy Center estimated Friday that the tax provisions of the budget plan introduced this week by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., would reduce tax revenues by $5.7 trillion over a 10-year period, requiring a corresponding amount of tax increases and/or spending cuts to keep it “revenue neutral,” or risk a substantial expansion of the budget deficit.

Leaders of the Senate Finance Committee said Thursday they plan to begin developing a proposal for overhauling the nation’s Tax Code.

A majority of business leaders believe tax reform should be separated from reforms to government entitlement programs and deficit reduction, according to a new poll.

House Republicans and Senate Democrats are introducing competing budget plans with starkly different tax proposals.

The chairman of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, Dave Camp R-Mich., released a set of proposals Tuesday discussion draft aimed at reforming the tax laws for small businesses.

The number of tax-delinquent federal workers and retirees increased by 11.5 percent in 2011, according to Internal Revenue Service data.

A Texas lawmaker who also operates a CPA practice has introduced a pair of bills in the Texas legislature that would exempt CPAs who prepare financial statements for small businesses from the state’s mandatory peer review program, and ensure at least two sole practitioners are represented on the Texas State Board of Accountancy.

With lawmakers under pressure to find ways to reduce the deficit while avoiding the more painful spending cuts in the sequester, the Senate Budget Committee held a hearing to examine how to reduce the deficit by eliminating wasteful spending in the Tax Code.

Consumer spending in the U.S. rose in January even as incomes dropped by the most in 20 years, showing households were weathering the payroll-tax increase by socking away less money in the bank.

President Obama said that he hoped to work with members of both parties in Congress to stop the damaging impact of the $85 billion in automatic spending cuts that officially began on Friday.

The Senate has confirmed Jacob Lew as the next Secretary of the Treasury, succeeding Timothy Geithner.

Less than two months ago Washington escaped from the doomsday scenario of the looming “fiscal cliff.” Now it faces the threat of the less colorfully named “sequester” or “sequestration,” depending on who’s talking about it, but somehow the dire warnings of impending disaster are beginning to sound unconvincing.

President Obama appealed to Congress to balance tax reforms with spending cuts to avoid the painful automatic cuts imposed by the budget sequester deal.

An advocacy group and a former congressional candidate have filed suit against the Internal Revenue Service in an effort to force the IRS to enforce its laws prohibiting tax-exempt 501(c)4 groups from engaging in political activity.