Practice and client management

The Internal Revenue Service is about to get an unprecedented look at bank accounts and investments U.S. citizens hold abroad, through a law that is making it harder to hide assets from the tax collector.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued final regulations on the tax credit available to certain small employers that offer health insurance coverage to their employees under the Affordable Care Act.

It’s probably one of the most frustrating and time-consuming jobs in tax prep: fixing the mistakes of preparers who mangled a business or individual return before you saw it.

A client decided that to grow her business she needed a top-tier sales manager and recruited someone from a much larger competitor.

Tax blogger Robert Flach sees many flaws in the IRS's proposed new voluntary program.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued an updated Qualified Intermediary Agreement for foreign banks that have been approved to withhold funds from a client’s bank account to be paid to the IRS.

Former attorney and CPA Paul M. Daugerdas, 63, has been sentenced to 15 years in prison for orchestrating a massive scheme in which he and co-conspirators hawked fake tax shelters for wealthy individuals to evade more than $1.6 billion in federal taxes.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

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

Now that school is out (unless you live in a part of the country still making up for lost “snow days”), it’s easy to get caught up in the general euphoria and take a vacation from thoughts of tax preparation for the summer. But now is precisely the time preparers need to keep communication lines open with their clients, according to Chuck McCabe, president of Peoples Income Tax and The Income Tax School.

The Internal Revenue Service is moving ahead with a voluntary tax preparer education program after legal challenges derailed an earlier mandatory testing and continuing education program.

The Internal Revenue Service has successfully implemented a provision of the Affordable Care Act involving prescription drug fees imposed on pharmaceutical manufacturers and importers, according to a new report.

A new study suggests that tax filing season could be the best time to sign up clients for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act rather than the current open enrollment period.

All too often in the practice of accounting we are predominately attentive to adhering to the concepts and conventions promulgated by the “accounting gods.”

House Republicans are accusing Lois Lerner, the former director of the Internal Revenue Service’s Exempt Organizations unit, of emailing a colleague about subjecting Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the former chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, to an IRS examination.

The House Ways and Means Committee has approved legislation aimed at simplifying the many tax credits available for education.

The Internal Revenue Service has posted an updated Foreign Financial Institution Agreement on its Web site for implementing the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, or FATCA.

The American Institute of CPAs has sent a letter expressing strong concern with the Internal Revenue Service’s proposed voluntary certification program for tax return preparers, saying it “would cause significant legal problems that may ultimately frustrate the IRS’s goals, confuse the public, and lead to litigation.”

The IRS Electronic Tax Administration Advisory Committee presented its 2014 Annual Report to Congress during a public meeting Tuesday, with recommendations including the creation of an online IRS account for individual and business taxpayers and tax professionals.

U.S. lawmakers argued late into the night over a computer hard drive that crashed in 2011, taking the controversy surrounding the Internal Revenue Service to a new level of acrimony.