Tax practice

A bipartisan pair of lawmakers have introduced a bill that aims to ensure better tax compliance on the part of professional employer organizations and protect small businesses.

The Internal Revenue Service has been updating its assessment of the extent to which underreported employment taxes are contributing to the tax gap, but it may not be using the right methodology to revise its numbers.

The unemployment rate climbed a tenth of a percentage point to 9.2 percent after employers added only 18,000 jobs in June, the lowest level in nine months.

A bipartisan pair of senators have announced a compromise on ending the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit at the end of this month.

The Internal Revenue Service said Thursday it would stop its examinations of donors to tax-exempt 501(c)(4) political organizations asking whether they had paid gift taxes, after the agency came under pressure from Republican lawmakers.

President Obama took to Twitter for the White House’s first-ever Twitter Town Hall, answering questions from his “tweeps” about taxes, the economy and other subjects.

The Internal Revenue Service said Wednesday that parents may be able to qualify for a tax credit to help defray the added expenses of summer day camp for their children.

President Barack Obama plans to meet with congressional leaders on Thursday to try to strike an agreement on raising the debt ceiling through a combination of spending cuts and revenue increases.

The Internal Revenue Service said Tuesday that it has reached an agreement with the Millennium Multiple Employer Welfare Benefit Plan, which went bankrupt last year.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., offered 18 proposals to cut $1.29 trillion from the federal budget deficit over 10 years, including closing corporate tax loopholes and eliminating special tax breaks for wealthy Americans and big companies.

President Obama used his weekly address to say it was necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy to help close the budget deficit.

An inmate in a New Jersey prison has pleaded guilty to scamming the Internal Revenue Service out of nearly $215,000 by recruiting his fellow prisoners and filing false tax returns for them.

A New York accounting firm employee has admitted to defrauding clients of a payroll services company out of more than $3 million in tax money.

The Internal Revenue Service has selected 33 companies as prime contractors to provide information technology services over a 10-yer period.

In March of this year, we devoted this column to the Internal Revenue Service's newly announced 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative for disclosing income from foreign accounts and assets. Key features of the program are an Aug. 31, 2011, deadline, an eight-year disclosure period, a maximum 25 percent penalty for failure to disclose, reduced 12.5 or 5 percent penalties in specified situations, and various documentation and disclosures required with the submission.

JACKSON HEWITT FILES CH. 11

Washington, D.C. - The Internal Revenue Service said in mid-June that approximately 275,000 organizations have automatically lost their tax-exempt status under the law because they did not file legally required annual reports for three consecutive years.

Meet the new IRS—the kinder, gentler IRS. It's an agency with processes that are fast becoming structured, streamlined—and strangely quiet.

IMGCAP(1)]Accountants, insurance professionals and others need to be careful that they don’t become what the IRS calls material advisors.

PDI Global, which is part of the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters, has released its 2011-2012 Tax Planning Guide.