Practice Management

The Senate has confirmed Douglas H. Shulman as the new commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.

H&R Block has sold the mortgage loan-servicing business of its Option One Mortgage Corp. subsidiary to investor Wilbur Ross' private equity firm in a transaction valued at approximately $1.1 billion.

Sage Software has updated its Sage FAS software with a service update to reflect the economic stimulus package recently enacted by Congress.

IRS IMPROVES ONLINE TAX TOOLSWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has improved its online refund-tracking tool and tax information publication. The online version of Publication 17, Your Federal Income Tax, now contains electronic links that allow users to navigate it more quickly. Both the downloadable PDF and HTML version contain more than 800 hyperlinks. The links allow users to jump immediately to other parts of the publication. The HTML version of Publication 17 on the IRS Web site, www.irs.gov, is also accessible to visually impaired taxpayers, in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This is not another article about great leadership characteristics. It’s about the weak and inept leaders and what firm partners need to do to change the current situations.Partners need to stop kidding themselves regarding the effect of weak leadership on their firms. Ineffective leaders do more harm than good. Now is the time to rise in arms and perhaps show weak and ineffective leaders the door.

The Government Accountability Office has issued a report on the Internal Revenue Service's performance so far this filing season, including a prediction that the IRS will lose hundreds of millions of dollars responding to calls about tax rebates.

Thomson Tax & Accounting has introduced an estate-planning notebook organizer that accountants can send to their clients as gifts.

There are a lot of very good research tools on the market. But what's available for the small practitioner who needs less than high-powered products?

The administration’s budget proposal to conform the penalty standards applicable to preparers and taxpayers has been welcomed by tax professionals concerned about possible conflicts of interest between preparers and their clients.The budget, the administration’s blueprint for legislative proposals, also calls for making permanent the 2001-2003 tax cuts, and offers measures to increase savings and investment and to improve compliance with the tax system. Rather than address Alternative Minimum Tax reform, it proposes a one-year patch to keep the number of taxpayers subject to the tax at around 4 million.

While many Washington observers have called much of the tax revenue side of the Bush administration’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget proposals dead on arrival, this year’s “Blue Book” of Treasury explanations nevertheless remains an important tax-planning tool.It underscores what the Bush administration considers are problems remaining to be solved. As such, they are problems that need to be either addressed or “planned around” in the meantime. Here is our take on some of the highlights in making that determination.