Practice and client management

The Internal Revenue Service said it is now allowing some suspended or disbarred tax practitioners to obtain or renew preparer tax identification numbers and prepare federal tax returns for compensation as a result of recent court decisions in the Loving v. IRS case.

A former Chicago tax preparer was sentenced to nearly four years in prison for filing nearly 3,200 false federal income tax returns that claimed refunds totaling more than $3.37 million for clients.

The IRS Oversight Board has sent a letter to the leaders of Congress’s main tax committees urging them not to re-instate a privatized tax debt collection program.

Bernard Madoff’s fraud might have been detected with enough due diligence in mid-2006, more than two years before the Ponzi scheme collapsed, a U.S. Tax Court judge ruled.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases -- now with more insurance fraud!

The Internal Revenue Service plans to substantially change the regulations it proposed last fall for tax-exempt “social welfare” organizations and their political activities before moving ahead with a public hearing.

Enhanced Section 179 expensing allowances, along with dozens of other “temporary” tax provisions, expired at the end of last year.

A site that connects people to online accounting degree programs has created a new infographic on Taxes Around the World, including some strange taxes such as a tax on cow flatulence in Denmark and a tax break in Canada for makers of breakfast cereal who put toys inside the boxes.

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday its new Web-based system, IRS Direct Pay, has been used by more than 150,000 taxpayers so far.

The Internal Revenue Service’s Employee Plans Compliance Unit recently looked at whether employee benefit plan sponsors had completed all the necessary steps after filing a Form 5500-series return showing they had adopted a resolution to terminate the plan, and found that many did not.

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it will begin a one-year pilot program in June to help small businesses with retirement plans that owe penalties for not filing reporting documents.

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

The Internal Revenue Service and the Free File Alliance, have signed a one-year extension of their partnership to makes free tax software available to taxpayers.

Organizations across the globe are losing an estimated 5 percent of their annual revenues to occupational fraud, according to a new report from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, with total losses estimated at about $3.5 trillion.

Credit Suisse AG, which pleaded guilty Monday to helping Americans evade taxes, has so far avoided identifying thousands of customers who cheated the Internal Revenue Service. Instead, it promised to point investigators in the right direction.

The recently released discussion draft of the Tax Reform Act of 2014 by the House Ways and Means Committee is intended to simplify the existing tax code, make it fairer to taxpayers and strengthen the U.S. economy by lowering tax rates.

A new report from the advocacy group Citizens for Tax Justice finds that 301 Fortune 500 companies hold a combined $2 trillion offshore, collectively avoiding $550 billion in U.S. corporate income taxes, while a contrasting report from the Tax Foundation found that U.S. multinational corporations reported paying more than $128 billion in corporate taxes to foreign countries on $470 billion of taxable income in 2010—an effective rate of 27.2 percent before also paying U.S. taxes.

The economic benefits of the income exclusion for U.S. citizens working abroad are uncertain, according to a new government report.

Rep. Jim Renacci, R-Ohio, a CPA, has introduced a bipartisan bill to bring more accountability and transparency to the federal government’s financial statements by making the Federal Accounting Standards Advisory Board more independent.

The form for reporting foreign bank and financial accounts, or FBAR, must be filed by June 30 through the BSA E-Filing System, the IRS is reminding taxpayers.