Tax practice

Are CPAs really afraid to talk about fees with their clients? That’s what Tom Wheelwright, founder of the accounting firm ProVision, thinks.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew has reportedly fired off a letter to officials in the European Union complaining about recent tax investigations of U.S.-based multinationals like Apple, McDonald’s, Amazon and Starbucks.

The Senate has included a permanent ban on taxes for Internet service within a larger trade enforcement bill that was passed Thursday.

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

The Internal Revenue Service nearly doubled the amount of money it paid to tax whistleblowers last year and is taking steps to make the process move faster.

An Internal Revenue Service employee who worked for the Taxpayer Advocate Service, where her job was to help taxpayers resolve their identity theft problems, pleaded guilty to stealing identities and orchestrating a tax-fraud scheme involving up to $1.5 million in fraudulent income tax returns.

Maryland's comptroller has suspended processing electronic and paper tax returns from 11 private preparers at 14 locations.

A New York City CPA is launching a startup company this tax season that he hopes will become an “Uber for taxes.”

Many major tax changes go into effect this year for individual taxpayers.

An influential senator is asking the Internal Revenue Service to put a system in place to track the specific sources of unpaid corporate taxes.

The Treasury Department’s inspector general is pressing the Internal Revenue Service in a new report to improve its procedures for direct debt installment agreements to avoid taxpayer defaults.

For several years, researchers have been sending people into tax preparation offices to test the quality of the work. The results have been scary.

The Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday evening that it recently identified and halted an automated attack upon its Electronic Filing PIN application on IRS.gov.

Ernst & Young has released the results of its latest survey with the Tax Council of tax executives and tax practitioners about their predictions for tax reform.

The Obama administration released its fiscal year 2017 budget containing a number of tax increases on high-income taxpayers, oil and foreign income, along with tax breaks for the middle class and small businesses, plus a provision giving the Treasury Department the explicit authority to regulate all paid tax preparers.

Some partners in hedge funds, private-equity firms and other businesses organized as so-called pass-throughs would pay a 3.8 percent income tax under President Barack Obama’s 2017 budget request.

A former Internal Revenue Service revenue agent is facing trial this week for soliciting and receiving a bribe from the owner of a Seattle marijuana dispensary.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued inflation adjustments for several tax breaks involving schoolteacher expenses, transit fringe benefits and Section 179 expensing of certain depreciable assets.

With many of the largest U.S. college endowments at record values, two congressional committees that determine tax policy jointly opened an inquiry about how the wealthiest schools manage and spend those funds.

Congress’s passage of legislation last December making many expired tax breaks permanent adds an extra measure of certainty for tax preparers helping their clients with tax planning this year.