In the Blogs: Dreams and Delusions

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

Dreams and delusions

  • Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders: A look at a new book with a title a lot of practitioners can get behind: Accounting Dreams & Delusions. Which to start with depends on your length of experience. Also, a handful of topics to get your IT department talking.
  • Taxjar: The tax implications behind your good-hearted clients’ drop shipments.
  • Liberty Tax: Personal fundraising Web sites such as Kickstarter are all the rage, and maybe some of your clients have turned to them to fuel new and heartfelt ventures. Good for them – just make sure they know the money doesn’t appear tax-free.
  • The Income Tax School: What’s your firm’s strategic plan? Beyond that, what’s a balanced scorecard to help you achieve that plan?
  • Taxable Talk: The good and not-so-good news about last filing season, via the recent TIGTA analysis. On the up side: better IRS detection of fraudulent tax returns and ID theft returns. On the down: IRS customer service on the phone.
  • The Tax Times: Specifics behind Notice 2015-66, under which the Feds intend to amend regulations under Sections 1471-1474 to extend the time that certain FATCA transitional rules will apply.

‘Nigh on three years’

  • IRS Problem Solver Blog: Country singer David Allan Coe apparently decided as early as 1993 that he wasn’t payin’ taxes around here no more. His current resulting troubles.
  • Due Diligence: In this week’s roundup: “Ghost Branch Whistleblower Cases?”; “Whistleblower Claims Hospital Used Medicare $ for BMWs”; “Too Little, Too Late? DOJ’s New White Collar Push”; and “Brokerage Firm Loses When ‘Dead Broker Reappears’.”
  • Federal Tax Crimes: Contesting actual tax liability in bankruptcy with an eye to seeking relief from a restitution order, via the case of the Wyly brothers, disgorgement and Prof. Keith Fogg of Villanova Law School.

Taking sides

  • TaxProf: Fun to Imagine Dept.: A look at a recent Forbes piece entitled “Would the IRS Revoke the Catholic Church’s Tax-Exempt Status If Pope Francis Endorses Bernie Sanders?” We don’t know, but when a Union Civil War general asked Lincoln if the president thought God was on the North’s side, Lincoln replied, “I think it’d be more important for us to be on God’s side.”
  • The Wandering Tax Pro: A “professional ‘commercial’ tax return preparer” takes a hard look at the new CPE requirements in New York State.
  • Our Taxing Times: Joining Tubman, Roosevelt, Parks and others, a new candidate for the portrait on the next $10 bill – a U.S. admiral whose career stretches back decades.

‘A Coke and a bill’

  • Tax Vox: How the House voted to freeze funding for Planned Parenthood, hoping it could help avert a shutdown by appeasing 31 “seemingly-unappeasable Republicans” who want to defund the organization completely. Plus, the IRS claims Coca Cola owes $3.3 billion in taxes and interest for 2007 to 2009, and state budgets are improving, “but not necessarily over the long term.”
  • Tax Girl: More on Coke’s tax hole, with the soda giant maintaining that the additional tax is related to “a transfer pricing dispute.” In other words, possibly shifting profits from high tax countries to low. Is it the real thing?
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