Practice and client management

A 70-year-old Southern California tax preparer pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court to allegations that he aided and assisted in the preparation of false tax returns and endeavored to obstruct the administration of the Tax Code.

The Internal Revenue Service improperly transferred hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer payments to its Excess Collection File, often without the right documentation, according to a new report.

The Internal Revenue Service has begun taking steps to stop tax preparers with criminal tax convictions or permanent injunctions from preparing tax returns, sending letters to 19 tax preparers proposing to revoke their Preparer Tax Identification Numbers.

IMGCAP(1)]Luca Pacioli, an Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar, is widely known as the “Father of Accounting” for publishing 36 chapters on the double-entry accounting method used by Venetian merchants during the Italian Renaissance.

A California judge has frozen the assets of “Tax Lady” Roni Deutch after the state attorney general asked the court to hold her in contempt for shredding millions of documents and wrongfully diverting funds from clients of her tax law firm.

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.

IMGCAP(1)]Capital One Credit Card has had a successful ad campaign for several years featuring some lovable but clumsy Vikings in humorous situations.

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.

Cloud-based document storage and sharing service SmartVault announced it has officially joined The CloudSolutions Alliance, the CPA-focused group formed in 2010 by Fujitsu and cloud-based sales tax automation service provider SpeedTax, with the goal of educating and gaining further access to firms who would be most interested in their services.

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More than half of senior executives polled indicated that their respective companies have a formal sustainability strategy in place, while another 31 percent said they are either working on a plan or expect to eventually adopt one.

“The Pale King,” the novel about the Internal Revenue Service that author David Foster Wallace was writing before he committed suicide, hit the bookstores on April 15.

CPA-focused consulting firm and hosting service Xcentric said Monday it has completed the purchase of technology consultancy InfoTech Partners North America, bringing on board prominent consultant Roman Kepczyk.

The American Institute of CPAs has included the latest guidance from the Financial Accounting Standards Board on accounting for mergers and acquisitions in the newest edition of its book Accounting Trends & Techniques.

The Internal Revenue Service has been doing a better job of detecting and preventing fraudulent refunds this filing season, but programming bugs and inadequate controls are still allowing erroneous claims to get through for various tax credits.

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.

Taxpayers set a record over the weekend, surpassing the 100 million mark for electronically filed tax returns so far this season.

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.