Tax practice

As a Senate subcommittee and the Internal Revenue Service probe the use of Swiss bank accounts as tax havens by UBS, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has called for revoking the U.S. banking license of UBS.

The taxes paid by U.S. consumers are rising higher overall at gas pumps, retail stores and cigarette counters, according to a new survey.

Automobile donations have sharply declined since 2004, when Congress tightened the tax rules for claiming charitable deductions, according to an analysis of IRS data by Grant Thornton.

The presidential race has produced an interesting series of charges and counter-charges about the candidates' tax policies, and lately they've involved taxes on small business owners.

A Chicago businessman has pleaded guilty to tax fraud conspiracy charges stemming from an agreement with a Chicago-based banker and tax shelter promoter to fraudulently obtain referral fees relating to tax shelter transactions.

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has proposed a tax credit for small businesses that offer health insurance to their employees.

Ford Motor Co. is suing the Internal Revenue Service, claiming the agency owes the automaker $445.3 million in interest on tax overpayments.

The Internal Revenue Service has begun issuing summonses as it investigates Colorado's program for conservation easement tax credits.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressed their support for the convergence of International Financial Reporting Standards with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, provided an update this week on his correspondence with several media-based ministries about issues related to their tax-exempt status, indicating that some ministries have not been answering his questions.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit issued an opinion in a tax dispute that found the U.S. Tax Court is not a court as defined by law.

A jury returned guilty verdicts against Joseph H. Smith, the former treasurer, CFO and legal secretary of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, on charges of conspiracy and filing false tax returns.

CCH began offering Global Daily Tax News on its CCH Tax Research Network, providing country-specific national and local tax and business news coverage to help users remain in compliance and support their tax planning.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on proposed tax treaties and protocols with Canada, Iceland and Bulgaria.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has released a report outlining her office’s priorities over the coming fiscal year, including improving Internal Revenue Service procedures to protect victims of tax-related identity theft and helping people who have lost their homes to foreclosure.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued a new revenue procedure that aims to clear up some of the murkiness surrounding subprime loans and the tax treatment of securitized versions of those loans, though the murkiness is likely to remain for the majority of those loans anyway.

2009 HSA LIMITS RELEASEDWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has published the 2009 inflation-adjusted deduction limits for health savings accounts.

So far, 2008 has not been a year for major tax legislation.Nor, being an election year, are the remaining six months likely to offer major legislation. Two bills that did make it through Congress prior to Memorial Day included tax provisions focused on farmers and alternative energy and on military personnel and veterans. The farm legislation required the override of a presidential veto and included a procedural snafu where one of the non-tax titles of the legislation was not forwarded to President Bush along with the rest of the legislation. Barring any litigation over that issue, the enactment date of the legislation is May 22, 2008.

The state of e-services today can be compared to where e-filing was about five years ago.“If you look back five years, what we were saying about e-filing would sound a lot like what we’re saying about e-services today,” said Roger Harris, president of Padgett Business Services and former chair of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council. “As practitioners and the IRS worked together, a lot of problems were solved. And today e-filing is the normal way of doing business. It will be the same with e-services.”

The Internal Revenue Service plans to hold a conference call on July 8 with the six largest audit firms to convince them to do more to help track the use of secret foreign bank accounts for tax evasion.