Practice and client management

A former Internal Revenue Service agent has pleaded guilty to soliciting a $5,000 bribe from a small business he was auditing.

The Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that tax rebate checks and economic stimulus payments have boosted personal income, disposable income and personal consumption expenditures significantly since April.

The Senate Finance Committee held hearings on reforming international tax rules, looking at the ways the federal government taxes the foreign income of U.S. taxpayers and businesses.

The Internal Revenue Service has reversed itself on the rolling-average method of valuing inventory and will now consider it valid for tax purposes.

BNA has appointed Lisa Fitzpatrick as director of marketing for the company's tax and accounting product line.

A study by Grant Thornton found that only 843 U.S. corporations out of nearly 10,000 took advantage of a one-time dividend deduction that rewarded them for repatriating their foreign profits, giving them deductions totaling $265 billion.

Internet evangelist Bill Keller is challenging an Internal Revenue Service probe of his organization’s tax-exempt status.

The House passed a bill promising relief for another year from the spread of the alternative minimum tax, but the bill already faces opposition from the White House.

The House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee held hearings on bills that would encourage employers to automatically enroll their employees in individual retirement account plans.

REMINDER: Time to submit an entry for Practical Accountant’s Practice Innovation Award is running out. For application information, see the June issue of Practical Accountant. I don’t know about you, but I am getting tired of surveys. Especially those that promise you that filling it out will only take “a couple of minutes.” The last one that I filled out was for a major hotel chain conducted by a very, well-known company that conducts surveys nationwide.

The Internal Revenue Service is trying to cope with rising gas prices by increasing the optional standard mileage rates that taxpayers can use to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile.

The Internal Revenue Service has waived some limitations of the low-income housing tax credit in Indiana and Iowa so that owners of facilities in these states can provide housing to victims of recent storms and flooding.

Questions about economic stimulus payments and tax rebates kept the phones buzzing at Internal Revenue Service offices and cost the IRS a considerable chunk of its budget.

Calculations of economic stimulus payments by the Internal Revenue Service may have been wrong in nearly 400,000 cases.

The Internal Revenue Service said that about 5.2 million retirees and disabled veterans who qualify for economic stimulus payments have not filed to claim the payments.

A former UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, pled guilty to conspiring with an American billionaire real estate developer, Swiss bankers and co-defendant Mario Staggl to help the developer evade paying $7.2 million in taxes by helping him conceal $200 million of assets in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

The American Institute of CPAs has formed an online Succession Planning Resource Center to help small and midsized firms deal with questions of how their firm should be managed in the future.

Seventy-six percent of the 120 firms in attendance at the Forum for Women in Accounting, a three-day confab in its second year, have a strategic plan in place.

Charles Merrill, a self-made millionaire and cousin of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch, could end up serving three years or more in jail for not filing income taxes since beginning a tax protest in 2004.

A judge has ruled against the Internal Revenue Service in a Freedom of Information Act case, telling the agency to stop defying her previous orders and turn over statistical information to an outside researcher.