Practice management

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.

A central character in the 14-month dispute in Congress over the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of Tea Party groups is a computer hard drive.

To everyone but tax attorneys, the disclaimers referring to “Circular 230” that appear in the legends of most law firm e-mails are inscrutable as well as ubiquitous. The Internal Revenue Service has now changed its rules so that those disclaimers can be deleted permanently.

BKR International hosted a panel of some of the best accounting marketers in the country in conjunction with the Association for Accounting Marketing Annual Summit in Austin, Texas. Putting their smart brains together, they agreed on 10 best practices for building the reputation and visibility of accounting firms in a high technology, but still high touch industry.

Bloomberg BNA has released FATCA — Information Reporting and Withholding Under Chapter 4, a new report portfolio in which international tax practitioners from PricewaterhouseCoopers analyze the reporting and withholding requirements imposed by the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act on both financial and non-financial institutions.

Love them or hate them, there’s one thing everyone can agree upon about the major government-mandated changes sweeping through the world of health care insurance: They’re confusing. And since so many of the changes involves taxes, don’t be surprised if your clients expect you to have all the answers.

My father was dying—too young and too soon. He succumbed over a nine-month period to coronary heart disease. Today his life could have been extended, but not in 1976.

The House Ways and Means Committee chairman called for a special prosecutor to probe the Internal Revenue Service’s loss of e-mails from the time the agency gave extra scrutiny to Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases, including a surprising number of cases involving fraudulent families.

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

The Supreme Court has held that a taxpayer has a right to conduct an examination of Internal Revenue Service officials regarding their reasons for issuing a summons when he points to specific facts or circumstances plausibly raising an inference of bad faith.

Several due dates for those with offshore accounts are approaching, with far-reaching consequences for those who don’t comply.

The Internal Revenue Service generally took reasonable steps to plan for the required sequestration spending cuts in its fiscal year 2013 budget, although it needed to cut back on staffing for taxpayer service, collections and enforcement activity, according to a new government report.

Supreme Court overturns an appeals court opinion that would have allowed taxpayers to examine the IRS agents who summon them to find out if they have improper motives.