Practice management

The Internal Revenue Service has released its annual “Dirty Dozen” list of tax scams, advising taxpayers to be aware of identity theft, phishing scams and several other red flags that can cause financial mayhem.

During the recent Microsoft Convergence 2013 user and partner event we caught up with Jim Bowman, president and chief executive of SBS Group and inquired about their status as a top reseller, Master VAR and the state of the reseller partner profession in general.

The Internal Revenue Service has stepped up its examinations in the past year of taxpayers with high adjusted gross incomes, according to newly released IRS figures.

BlumShapiro has partnered with corporate performance management(CPM) software provider Tagetik to make CPM support services available to their client base across the United States.

The U.S. has asked Liechtenstein to hand over data on foundations that may have been used to hide untaxed American money from the Internal Revenue Service, a step that may threaten Swiss banks.

Back in 1925, a taxpayer won the first case in the Board of Tax Appeals involving the deduction for horse-breeding activity expenses. Deducting expenses related to the “sport of kings” was so attractive that the estate of Cornelius Vanderbilt tried, and lost, two years later. In the intervening 88 years, about 200 taxpayers have litigated the issue, most with unattractive results. The IRS and the courts have essentially told taxpayers to “stop horsing around.”

The Senate narrowly passed a budget for the first time in four years on a mostly party line vote, calling for $975 billion in additional tax revenue over the next 10 years along with state sales tax collections on online sales.

Bowing to pressure from Congress and media outlets, the Internal Revenue Service has released a pair of campy parody videos of Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island, while admitting that the $60,000 spent to produce the videos could have been better spent.

The House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee held a hearing this week to discuss possible tax reforms on financial products such as derivatives.

Large companies frequently cannot achieve their cost reduction targets because they keep focusing on the same business areas every year even if they don’t deliver the savings they once did, according to a new report from Deloitte.

The two leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have begun developing proposals for reforming the U.S. Tax Code, including giving the Internal Revenue Service the clear statutory authority to regulate tax preparers in case the IRS loses its appeal of a recent court case invalidating its Registered Tax Return Preparer regime.

As U.S. lawmakers drafted a bill extending wind-energy tax credits in August, they revised a key clause that opens the door for a much bigger boost to the industry than just the one-year addition that was eventually passed.

The United States is now facing two deficits—a government budget deficit and a balance of trade deficit. These two deficits, together, will ultimately put the future of the United States in peril unless the government and its citizens take strong action.

House Republicans have passed the budget plan introduced by House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for fiscal year 2014, which shrinks the number of tax brackets to two brackets of 10 and 25 percent.

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee is calling on the Internal Revenue Service to provide a detailed accounting of how much taxpayer money will be used to implement the health care reform law and many IRS employees will be needed to work on it.

CCH has improved its CCH Tax News Highlights App for iPhone, iPad and Android mobile devices with social media sharing features, a new interface and access to more content.

An influential lawmaker on Congress’s tax writing committee is calling on the Internal Revenue Service to release a copy of video parodies it shot of Star Trek and Gilligan’s Island.

In the world of trust and estate administration, where tax planning typically involves special attention to federal tax law compliance, it’s easy to lose focus on state income taxation issues. And while some states do not tax income related to trusts, states that do tax trust income have a variety of rules and criteria for which trusts are subject to tax.

The Internal Revenue Service is giving relief from late-payment tax penalties to individuals and businesses that request a tax-filing extension because they are attaching to their returns any of the forms that couldn’t be filed until after January.

The U.S. economy will be between 1.5 and 2.6 percent smaller over the long-term because other nations’ corporate tax rates are considerably more competitive, according to a new study by Ernst & Young and the RATE Coalition, a group lobbying for lower corporate tax rates.