Tax practice

Heads of state meeting at the G7 Summit in Bavaria, Germany committed to promoting automatic exchange of tax information and tax rulings to discourage multinational companies from shifting profits from country to country to avoid taxes.

Trade groups representing the banking, credit union and financial services industry are sounding the alarm over a provision in a bill already passed by the Senate that would require them to report information to the Internal Revenue Service on both interest-bearing and non-interest-bearing accounts.

Some of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

A businessman caught in a money-laundering sting helped the U.S. prosecute a foreign business—and now he’s seeking $22.2 million from the government as a reward.

LexisNexis has introduced Lexis Advance Tax, a specialized research portal providing news and analysis to accountants, tax and estate attorneys, government tax professionals and other tax practitioners.

The House Judiciary Committee, through its Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law, held a hearing Tuesday on nexus issues involving three bills before the Committee.

The Supreme Court has turned away a request for judicial review from a 55-year-old CPA who sued Baylor Law School for age discrimination after the school rejected his application.

As expatriate taxpayers face increasing difficulties from implementation of the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, the Internal Revenue Service is offering YouTube videos and other online resources to assist taxpayers overseas.

The Tax Court has held in favor of a taxpayer who claimed a whistleblower award that the Internal Revenue Service wanted to reject because the whistleblower had brought the information directly to an IRS operating division before filling out paperwork requesting an award from the IRS Whistleblower Office.

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

A trade association representing the casino industry is sounding the alarm over proposed regulations from the Internal Revenue Service that would lower the threshold for reporting winnings from slot machines, keno and bingo.

Rothschild Bank AG, the Zurich-based private bank of the Rothschild financial dynasty, became the latest Swiss bank to be fined by the U.S. Justice Department for helping Americans conceal assets offshore.

H&R Block is testing new technology that uses Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality equipment to provide avatars of tax preparers for customers of the future.

The Internal Revenue Service has released new guidance on penalties for failing to file a foreign bank account report, capping the maximum percentage of the penalty and providing new requirements for documentation and approval by IRS examiners.

The Internal Revenue Service discovered last month that criminals accessed around 104,000 tax returns through its Get Transcript application and tried to get hold of approximately 100,000 more.

Victims of the severe storms, tornadoes, straight-line winds and flooding early last month in parts of Oklahoma may qualify for tax relief from the IRS.

The IRS’s initiative to expand online services for taxpayers makes it more likely that the U.S. tax agency will be hit by “hackers and other fraudsters,” the agency’s inspector general said Tuesday.

The digital edition of the June 2015 issue of Accounting Today is now available.

Microsoft Corp. and the IRS are back in court, this time fighting about the U.S. tax agency’s interest in hiring David Boies, the lawyer who beat Microsoft in an antitrust case in 2000.

The Internal Revenue Service is clarifying some of its procedures for changing a method of accounting.