Tax planning

Treasury Inspector General Faults IRS Security

The Internal Revenue Service is postponing its tax-filing deadline for victims of the recent floods, storms and tornadoes in four states.

The Senate Finance Committee heard testimony from Roby B. Sawyers, a professor in the College of Management at North Carolina State University and a member of the American Institute of CPAs' Tax Executive Committee, about the institute's recommendations for estate tax reform.

Employers Slash 80,000 Jobs in March

The Internal Revenue Service is looking for new members to apply for its Information Reporting Program Advisory Committee, including tax preparers.

A $5-per-patron fee on Texas strip clubs has been struck down as unconstitutional by a district judge.

The Justice Department's Tax Division hailed its victory in what it called an "important tax shelter case" that was decided in a Texas district court.

Senate Democratic and Republican leaders have reached a compromise on a bill to provide tax breaks and refinancing assistance to beleaguered homeowners hit by the mortgage crisis.

A new coalition wants to eliminate the taxation of Americans working abroad.

The Treasury Department has been pilot testing a free interface between its Electronic Federal Tax Payment System and Intuit's QuickBooks software and plans to expand the interface to other software.

Austin, Texas-based attorney John Ramsey had the last laugh, winning a $10,000 prize in Intuit's TurboTax TaxLaugh contest with a series of tax jokes.

DiCicco, Gulman & Co. Gets World Series Trophy Visit

New York State lawmakers have dropped a plan by former Governor Eliot Spitzer to raise taxes on millionaires.

Small business owners are more likely than consumers to use a tax professional, according to a new survey, with 74 percent of small business owners planning to get help, while only 58 percent of consumers said they would.

Wolters Kluwer Law & Business has agreed to acquire the Accountants Division of MYOB UK and MYOB Ireland for 35.5 million pounds ($70.5 million), bringing the small business accounting and tax software developer into Wolters Kluwer UK's CCH Software division.

NetWorth Services said it is offering a special promotion for its online cost basis calculation service, Netbasis, allowing users to buy one transaction and get one free until April 15.

IRS LAUNCHES E-POSTCARDS FOR TAX-EXEMPTSWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has introduced an electronic filing system that allows small tax-exempt organizations to file Form 990-N “e-Postcards” to report their annual income.

If you thought that the tax legislation passed at the end of 2007 — both the Alternative Minimum Tax relief legislation and the mortgage debt forgiveness relief legislation — finally resolved the issues that would have to be addressed for the 2007 tax return filing season, you were mistaken. Congress was not done creating issues that would impact those returns. The Economic Stimulus Act of 2008, signed by President Bush on Feb. 13, 2008, has created additional issues for 2007 return filers.Most of the direct impact will be on lower-income individuals — individuals who are not normally required to file tax returns but who may wish to do so in order to qualify to receive a rebate check authorized under the new legislation.

This year’s tax return filing season appears to be proceeding smoothly, despite the initial confusion that was generated by the seemingly annual last-minute tax legislation.Included in that flurry of new guidelines were the Tax Increase Prevention Act of 2007, which passed in December and included an Alternative Minimum Tax patch for the year that required some fine-tuning of the Internal Revenue Service’s computers to process returns that might be subject to the AMT; and the Mortgage Forgiveness Debt Relief Act of 2007, which also passed in December, and excluded mortgage debt forgiveness for homeowners whose home at foreclosure sold for less than the outstanding mortgage, if a portion of the unpaid debt was forgiven. In total, more than 10 forms this season were affected by the AMT patch.

Much of the election-year criticism of hedge funds misses the point when it focuses on the claim that hedge fund operators get unfair tax breaks, experts say.There is abuse in the current Tax Code when it comes to hedge funds, but it affects the investors, according to Alan Dlugash, a tax partner at New York-based CPA and business advisory firm Marks Paneth & Shron. They’re often subjected to taxes that wipe out nearly all — or more than all — of the income that they made from the fund, he observed.