Practice management

The House has again passed the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act, an effort to help people whose homes have been foreclosed by canceling taxes on any mortgage debt they have been forgiven.

The House approved an amended version of a bill that delivers tax relief to members of the armed services, in addition to emergency volunteers.

The House has passed a fix for the alternative minimum tax, voting 352-64 to keep up to 23 million taxpayers from falling prey to the AMT.

The Treasury Department has issued a report on improving the competitiveness of the U.S. business tax system, offering three alternative approaches designed to cut the corporate tax rate in the U.S. compared to other industrialized countries.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued guidance on whether a taxpayer can claim a dependency exemption deduction for an unrelated child.

The Internal Revenue Service improved most of its filing season services during 2007, but there are still opportunities for better performance this coming season, according to a new report.

IRS is driven in its desire to close the tax gap and views tax practitioners as being an obstacle in the middle, according to Charles Rettig with the law firm of Hochman, Salkin, Toscher & Perez, P.C.,in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Periodically, the partners of all accounting firms should pause and assess the strategic direction of the firm. Strategy and tactics are easily confused, and I've worked with many firms that hold a strategic advance only to get bogged down in tactical detail. So what's the difference?Strategy deals with direction. It deals with "what we are about." It deals with "What will we look like in three or five years?" Tactics are those necessary action steps that we must take every day, week or month that will get us to that future state.

Environmental whistleblower Marrita Murphy has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear her civil rights tax appeal after another appeals court reversed its own original ruling.

A computer program the Internal Revenue Service has been developing to expedite tax-exempt status requests is behind schedule, over budget and not performing all that well either, according to a report from the Treasury Department's in-house watchdog.

The Internal Revenue Service has appointed Tim Hubbs, president and CEO of Drake Software, as the chairman of its Electronic Tax Advisory Committee.

Notice 2008-1 provides rules under which a 2 percent shareholder/employee in an S corporation is entitled to the deduction under Section 162(l) for accident and health insurance premiums paid or reimbursed by the S corporation and included in a shareholder or employee's gross income.

IRS EXTENDS DEFERRED-COMP DEADLINEAfter repeated pleas from tax practitioners, lawyers and others, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service announced that they would extend the final deadline for compliance with new rules on nonqualified deferred-compensation plans for a year, until Dec. 31, 2008.

While friends and family are more concerned with the holidays at hand, tax practitioners are taking last-minute steps to ensure that they and their clients have a successful tax season.Training people to be able to staff the offices properly is key for Peoples Income Tax Inc., said chief executive Charles McCabe. "There just isn't a supply of qualified preparers out there who are willing to work for three months. And if someone is available, you have to ask why they are available - you don't want to hire someone else's problem."

The current wrangling over the alternative minimum tax is a symptom of the larger problems with having a Tax Code built on patchwork over nearly a century, to the point that it resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption, according to David A. Lifson, president of the New York State Society of CPAs and a co-managing partner at New York-based Hays & Co. LLP.Lifson, who recently testified before the Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on the AMT, also chaired the NYSSCPA Committee on Tax Reform that issued a comprehensive proposal to revise the current tax system.

One week after Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., introduced his massive, dream tax reform proposal, and after acknowledging that that proposal had no chance of passage this year, Chairman Rangel introduced a more modest stop-gap proposal, H.R. 3996, including primarily one-year fixes for expiring provisions and some proposals to address the mortgage crisis.Most commentators seem to feel that this legislation has a fairly good chance of passing this year in something close to its present form.

The Internal Revenue Service said that the amounts paid for certain diagnostic procedures and devices, such as an annual physical examination, a full-body electronic scan and a pregnancy test kit, qualify as deductible medical care expenses if they are not otherwise compensated.

For tax year 2007, the Internal Revenue Service has implemented a new policy that assumes an e-mail substitute form submission has been approved if the IRS does not otherwise notify the taxpayer who submits it within 20 business days.

The U.S. Senate has passed a version of the energy bill after removing a controversial tax increase on major oil and gas producers from the version approved by the House.

The House passed a new version of its patch for the alternative minimum tax that eliminates a controversial provision to raise taxes on the carried interest earnings of managers of private equity firms and hedge funds.