Practice and client management

Some of our favorite recent tax cases.

Early on my boss took me to a client that I was to work on. He started to explain what needed to be done and what the client did, but then he said, “I hate this client—everything is always messed up and nothing ever makes sense.”

Six former Internal Revenue Service employees have pleaded guilty to receiving unemployment benefits while they worked at the agency.

For tax preparers who were somewhat dismayed by the recent IRS statistics indicating a slight drop-off in the number of taxpayers who were using a professional to prepare their taxes as opposed to do-it-yourself tax software, take heart.

The push for a corporate tax holiday to encourage repatriation of an estimated $2.1 trillion in foreign profits seems to have gained traction again, thanks to a recent proposal from former President Bill Clinton, but such an idea could provide multinational companies with the incentive for earnings manipulation, according to a new study.

The IRS has issued a pair of one-page electronic publications containing information for individuals and families about the Affordable Care Act.

(Bloomberg) The U.S. House Ways and Means Committee voted to let companies write off more than half the cost of some investments immediately, providing a $287 billion tax cut to capital-intensive industries.

A federal jury found an 87-year-old Florida man owes the U.S. government civil penalties amounting to 150 percent of the value of his Swiss bank account, the biggest such penalty by percentage on record, his lawyers said.

Employers owed the Internal Revenue Service approximately $14.1 billion in delinquent Social Security, Medicare and individual federal income taxes that they had withheld from employee paychecks as of June 30, 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service is being urged to do more to assess penalties against them.

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

The Association for Accounting Marketing has handed out 43 awards for marketing achievement to accounting firms and their marketing employees.

U.S. corporations have reported to the Internal Revenue Service that 54 percent of their offshore profits are earned in 12 tax haven countries that, combined, only account for 4 percent of economic output among all countries where U.S. corporations do business.

A group of technology companies sent a letter Wednesday to leaders of the House Financial Services Committee objecting to legislation that would exempt companies with under $250 million in annual revenue from existing requirements to file financial statements as machine-readable open data.

Nearly 6 million Americans living abroad are facing a June 16 deadline to file their taxes this year.

Thomson Reuters has released a pair of new client marketing newsletters for CPA firms seeking to grow their accounting, auditing and international tax practices.

Between the rising popularity of content marketing and the fact that it isn’t going anywhere soon, many firms these days find themselves pondering the important question, “What do we have to say?”

The National Conference of CPA Practitioners is questioning a proposal to reinstate a discontinued program that would allow private contractors to collect unpaid tax debts on behalf of the Internal Revenue Service.

Thirteen Swiss banks face rising stakes in their own criminal probes after Credit Suisse Group AG set a new standard for punishment in the U.S. crackdown on offshore tax evasion.

The Internal Revenue Service has ruled that employers are not in compliance with the Affordable Care Act if they simply reimburse employees for buying insurance through one of the exchanges instead of establishing a health insurance plan for employees.

A Rhode Island man has been convicted of threatening to assault and murder an Internal Revenue Service revenue agent and his family.