Finance

As a general rule, the cost of commercial real estate improvements is recovered over a painfully long period of 39 years via straight-line depreciation only.

The House passed a bill Thursday prohibiting bonuses for IRS employees until the Treasury develops a better customer service strategy, the last of six bills passed this week affecting IRS bonuses, hiring practices and policies.

The Senate Finance Committee passed legislation Wednesday to protect taxpayers from identity theft and tax fraud, but without a provision for regulating tax preparers.

Rep. Sander Levin, D-Mich., the ranking member of the tax-writing House Ways and Means Committee, and other House Democrats introduced legislation Wednesday to restore the estate tax and gift tax rate and exemption level to the same amounts as in 2009.

When it comes to driving the U.S. economy, small businesses translate into big dollars.

The Senate Finance Committee has dropped a provision for regulating tax preparers from legislation that would curb identity theft and tax fraud.

Most people think of April as income-tax month for individuals, but it’s also the biggest business tax-filing month of the year. Why? Because four out of every five U.S. businesses are “pass-throughs,” meaning they are taxed on individual returns at individual rates.

The American Institute of CPAs is pushing for legislation that would make it easier for employees who work across state lines to do their taxes.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing Thursday on proposals to limit tax breaks for employers who provide health care for employees.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has introduced legislation, co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, that would require the Internal Revenue Service to develop a free, online tax preparation and filing service that taxpayers could use to prepare and file their taxes directly with the federal government.

The House Ways and Means Committee passed four pieces of Republican-sponsored legislation Wednesday restricting IRS employee bonuses, hiring and spending, with less than a week to go in tax season.

The House Ways and Means Committee plans to markup and vote Wednesday on four pieces of Republican-sponsored legislation aimed at limiting the Internal Revenue Service’s authority over its spending, particularly in the areas of employee bonuses, hiring, and delegation of user fees.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, has introduced legislation to combat tax refund theft by identity thieves.

Among the issues that are keeping tax executives up at night are anti-inversion rules that don’t address the root cause: an anti-competitive U.S. tax system.

Senior business leaders are concerned about some of the proposed tax changes they have heard from presidential candidates and other sources, according to a new survey by Friedman LLP.

While it has been around in a variety of forms since 1993, the exclusion for Qualified Small Business Stock Gains under section 1202 of the Tax Code didn’t really come into its own as a tax benefit until the exclusion rate increased to 100 percent in 2010.

The House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee is calling on the Internal Revenue Service, the Treasury Department and the Justice Department to return funds wrongly seized from taxpayers during civil asset forfeitures.

The National Retail Federation is urging Congress to reject any form of consumption tax as it considers a variety of tax reform proposals in a hearing Tuesday.

The number of presidential candidates has been steadily winnowing down in recent weeks as they suffer defeats in the primaries and caucuses, and so too their tax plans have been falling by the wayside.

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.