Tax planning

The Internal Revenue Service has appointed 12 new members for the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council, the group that serves as a forum for IRS officials and public representatives to discuss relevant and emerging tax issues.

A significant increase in sales prices for CPA firms in 2005 was one of several predictions made by a panel of experts at a recent accounting conference here.

Acorn, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, will provide free tax preparation services for low- and moderate-income families in 45 cities nationwide from now through the end of tax season.

Taxpayers who misreported their income to snare unjustified Earned Income Tax Credits are draining $2 billion a year from the U.S. Treasury, auditors at the Government Accountability Office recently told Congress.

Thanks to the help of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, more American jobs may stay in America in the near future.

President George W. Bush said this week that he will appoint Jeffrey F. Kupfer, Treasury deputy chief of staff, to serve as executive director of his bipartisan Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service issued interim guidance on two new penalty provisions enacted as part of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004.

Tax-prep conglomerate H&R Block and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now have teamed up in a partnership to help boost awareness of the Earned Income Tax credit and to reduce filing costs for low-income taxpayers. Block and Acorn will canvass some 65 cities in a door-to-door joint education effort aimed at low-income filers who may be eligible for the EITC. The effort will also highlight the costs and speed factors associated with refund options, and also work to hasten the elimination of costly fees connected with refund anticipation loans. Ironically, the Block-Acorn alliance comes exactly one year after Acorn held rallies at Block offices protesting what they perceived were aggressive sales of the company's RALs, which they claim unfairly targeted lower-income taxpayers.

Richard Hatch, the winner of the first season of the TV reality show "Survivor," has been charged with filing false tax returns by the Office of the U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island. The office alleged that Hatch had filed a false income tax return that omitted the more than $1 million in prize money that he received for winning the popular reality show. He also was charged with failing to report approximately $321,000 paid to him by a Boston radio station for co-hosting a program. The district attorney's office charged that, in November 2002, Hatch filed a false personal income tax return for the year 2000 and neglected to report the $1,010,000 paid to him by Survivor Entertainment Group, the production company of the reality show. Hatch reportedly was paid $10,000 for his appearance on the final episode of the first season, and $1,000,000 for winning the competition.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's plan to place new restrictions on the ability of accountants to offer tax services to their audit clients doesn't go far enough to restore investor confidence in financial reporting, critics of the accounting profession warned. In comments to the board expressing concern over new tax service restrictions proposed late last year, several tax experts urged the PCAOB to place auditors on an even shorter leash. In order to "help restore investor confidence in the independence of auditors and the integrity of their audits," the PCAOB should adopt a rule which prohibits audit firms from providing any tax services "which are unrelated to the audit," New York City tax attorney Robert Chira told the board. "I believe the board has clear and ample legal authority to prohibit such non-audit related tax services," he said in comments on the PCOAB proposal. "I further believe the board should exercise leadership in this area to persuade the Securities and Exchange Commission to the position that an audit firm should perform audits and not commingle that function with the performance of unrelated tax services." Harvard Law Professor Bernard Wolfman called for an even more far-reaching set of limitations on the sale of tax services by accountants. Arguing that the rule that the PCAOB proposed does not go far enough to ensure the independence of auditors, Wolfman maintained that "the auditor of a public company should not be permitted to render tax services to any company, whether the company is an audit client of the auditor or not." The only exception under Wolfman's plan would be for routine compliance work and tax return preparation. In contrast, the new rule proposed by the PCAOB in December would allow accountants to continue providing general tax services to audit clients, but prohibit them from marketing tax strategies that involve "an aggressive interpretation of applicable tax laws and regulations," or result in a tax avoidance maneuver that is a "listed or confidential" transaction under Treasury regulations. The proposal also calls for outlawing the use of contingent fees for tax services to audit clients, and would bar audit firms from providing any tax services to corporate officers who are "in a reporting oversight role of an audit client." The PCAOB wrestled with the idea of a far more restrictive policy toward tax services by auditors, but ultimately concluded that such an approach would be unnecessarily burdensome for accountants and their clients. In defending the PCAOB's decision to stop short of an all-out prohibition against the sale of tax services to audit clients, board member Daniel L. Goelzer said that "auditors have traditionally performed these kinds of services for their audit clients, and this kind of assistance is particularly important to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to maintain extensive in-house tax expertise."

Fiducial, a provider of business outsourcing services to small businesses and entrepreneurs, has acquired the accounting offices of Prince William County, Va., CPA firm Frisch Ambrosiano & Kontos PC, adding nearly 1,300 tax, write-up and payroll clients and two locations to its operations.

The Internal Revenue Service has revised Schedules K-1 for this year's filing season in an effort to reduce common errors and the burden associated with preparation and filing requirements.

Joining firms such as KPMG and Grant Thornton and tax prep firm Liberty Tax Service, members of the accounting community continue their efforts to offer relief to victims of the tsunami that has devastated Southeast Asia.

The total number of partnerships increased 5.2 percent to 2,242,169 for tax year 2002, while partnership net income decreased by 2.1 percent to $270.7 billion, according to the just-released Fall Statistics of Income Bulletin. For the first time, limited liability companies were the most common partnership entity type, totaling 946,130 partnerships, about 42 percent of all partnerships. The Fall 2004 SOI Bulletin also contains articles on individual tax returns for 2002, as well as articles on nonprofit charitable organizations, private foundations and the foreign tax credit. Taxpayers filed 130.1 million individual income tax returns for tax year 2002, a slight decrease from the 130.3 million returns filed for tax year 2001, according to the bulletin. The adjusted gross income reported on these returns totaled just over $6.0 trillion, a 2.2 percent drop from the previous year. This was the second consecutive year that AGI fell. The principal cause of the decline between 2001 and 2002 was a large decline in net capital gain on returns with income above $200,000. AGI on returns with income below $200,000 increased both years.

Just in time for consideration by the President's new bipartisan panel on tax reform, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson has released a report to Congress that identifies the complexity of the Internal Revenue Code as the most serious problem facing taxpayers and the IRS alike. "Without a doubt, the largest source of compliance burdens for taxpayers and the IRS alike is the overwhelming complexity of the tax code, and without a doubt, the only meaningful way to reduce these compliance burdens is to simplify the tax code enormously," Olson wrote. The report cited the alternative minimum tax , the earned income tax credit, and the large number of provisions designed to encourage taxpayers to save for education and for retirement as key illustrations of the problems of complexity wrought by the 1.4 million-plus word tax code. Once again, Olson noted the problems associated with the alternative minimum tax. "The need for AMT relief looms like the proverbial elephant in the room," she said, "and for that reason we once again, for the third year, recommend its repeal." The report also recommended that Congress simplify certain tax burdens on small businesses, streamline and simplify tax incentives for education savings and spending, streamline and simplify tax incentives for retirement savings, and provide guidance to the IRS to accept a broader array of offers in compromise submitted under a new "equitable consideration" standard.

Financial planning and tax prep firm Gilman + Ciocia, based here, has plans to expand in the Northeast, with the opening of three new offices slated for this month.

The Internal Revenue Service has updated for three states the tables that taxpayers can use to determine whether they'll benefit from deducting sales tax rather than state and local income taxes.

Practitioners who began adding tax planning services to their basic preparation several years back have found that it's a small step to branch out completely into year-round financial planning.

Washington - Senate Finance Committee chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Max Baucus, D-Mont., are calling for an independent investigation by the Government Accountability Office of the Offer in Compromise Program.In a letter to Treasury Secretary John Snow, the senators had questioned the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury implementation and administration of the OIC program. Based on the IRS response, the senators said that they have called for an investigation.

IRS INTEREST RATES UNCHANGED FOR THE FIRST QUARTER OF 2005: Interest rates for calculating the amount owed on refunds and deficiencies will remain unchanged for the calendar quarter beginning Jan. 1, 2005, the Internal Revenue Service said.The rates will remain at 5 percent for overpayments (4 percent for corporations); 5 percent for underpayments; 7 percent for large corporate underpayments; and 2.5 percent for the portion of a corporate overpayment exceeding $10,000. The rates are computed from the federal short-term rate based on daily compounding determined during October 2004.