Finance

A bipartisan group of Midwestern state senators introduced legislation Wednesday to update ethanol tax credit policies, but not repeal the tax credit.

The tax-related talk in Washington lately has shifted from overall tax reform to specific fixes like eliminating about $4 billion in tax breaks for major oil companies.

A bipartisan group of senators has renewed the effort to repeal tax credits for ethanol, introducing a bill Tuesday that would fully eliminate the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have asked for public comment on issues related to provisions of the health care reform law requiring employers to help pay for the cost of providing government-run health insurance to their employees.

A new analysis by Congress’s nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation found that 51 percent of U.S. households did not pay any federal income tax in 2009.

President Obama repeated his demand for Congress to eliminate an estimated $4 billion in tax breaks for the major oil and gas companies.

A number of years ago, a gaming and hospitality analyst whom I'd interviewed a number of times was fired after he told The Wall Street Journal that a certain casino in Atlantic City was basically a house of cards and would not survive.

The Comprehensive 1099 Taxpayer Protection and Repayment of Exchange Subsidy Overpayments Act of 2011, which passed Congress on April 5, 2011, eliminates two recently enacted 1099 reporting requirements that were to take effect in 2012. Still on the books, however, are a couple of new 1099 reporting requirements effective for 2011.

The Texas Society of CPAs has issued an analysis of the Obama administration’s call for eliminating special tax breaks for domestic oil and gas production and come out firmly against any repeal.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner blamed a “broken” tax system as one of the chief causes of the U.S. budget deficit.

It’s good that tax reform is high on the political agenda these days.

Two Republican congressional leaders have written to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman demanding information on how the IRS is spending $1 billion in funds the agency received under the health care reform law.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., released a plan Thursday to write legislation that would end billions of dollars in tax breaks for large multinational oil and gas companies.

President Obama has written to congressional leaders encouraging them to eliminate special tax breaks for the oil and gas industry.

The Internal Revenue Service needs to do a better job of collecting accurate tax return information from federal, state and local government entities, according to a new report.

Thomson Reuters released the latest Onesource Indirect Tax report on changes to state and local sales and use tax codes for the first quarter of 2011. According to the report, 83.3 percent of the changes are increases and new taxes and most are at the city and county level. They are likely a response to cut-backs in federal and state funding.

Lee Farkas, former chairman of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp., was found guilty of 14 counts of securities, bank and wire fraud and conspiracy to commit fraud for masterminding a scheme that prosecutors said cheated investors and the government out of $3 billion and led to the 2009 collapse of his company and Colonial Bank.

Three influential senators have written to Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Doug Shulman, asking him to re-evaluate the two-year time limit for innocent spouses to request tax relief.

In his best impersonation of a fiscal conservative, President Obama last week called for $1 trillion tax hikes on the wealthiest Americans as part of an effort to reduce the deficit by $4 trillion over the next dozen years.

The House passed the controversial budget plan introduced last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., in a largely party-line vote on Friday.