Tax season

Many tax preparers find themselves correcting goofs from clients’ previous preparers.

Jackson Hewitt Tax Service reported the best results it has seen in over five years this tax season, in contrast with competing tax prep chains H&R Block and Liberty Tax.

Major tax prep chains Liberty Tax Inc. and H&R Block reported that the number of returns they prepared this tax season were flat or down slightly.

In February, I wrote an article about the challenge I was about to embark on: tax season along with training for an Ironman competition.

H&R Block said Monday that two-thirds of tax filers among its client base who received health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act via the state or federal insurance marketplaces had to pay back an average of $729 of the Advance Premium Tax Credit, cutting their potential refund by nearly one-third.

The House Ways and Means Committee released a new report Wednesday on the Internal Revenue Service’s declining level of customer service during the 2015 tax-filing season, blaming the IRS for diverting funds away from taxpayer service to finance other priorities such as implementation of the Affordable Care Act.

The IRS is holding up its end of the chore of filing implications created by the ACA, according to Commissioner John Koskinen’s tax day testimony before a Senate committee.

The Web series Nacho Punch recently posted a funny new video for Tax Day satirizing trailers for romantic comedies, this one involving an accountant named Beth and a hapless taxpayer named Ben who fall in love over his taxes.

Scott Fleszar of Thomson Reuters Tax & Accounting talks with Dan Hood of Accounting Today about how accountants should deal with younger consumers who are accustomed to using mobile devices and Web-based services.

A new study of consumer spending of tax refunds finds a correlation between how the refunds are perceived and whether taxpayers opt to spend the money right away or save it for later.

Faced with steep budget cuts, the Internal Revenue Service directed more taxpayers to consult Web sites and its mobile app for answers to their questions this year rather than visiting the IRS’s walk-in Taxpayer Assistance Centers or calling its phone lines, while also using technology to detect tax refund fraud.

A new tax prep franchiser called Happy Tax is hoping to make a dent in an already crowded industry with a new business model involving CPAs.

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen has sent a message of thanks to tax professionals and their partners for managing to get through a “challenging” tax season.

The nonprofit organization Tax Analysts has created an interactive bar graph of audit rates to provide information on the chances of being audited by the Internal Revenue Service depending on different business types and individual income levels.

MapLight, a nonpartisan research organization that tracks money's influence on politics, has released a new analysis of how major tax and accounting organizations are spending funds on lobbying Congress and federal agencies.

Every year, millions of taxpayers miss out on chances to lower their tax bills. They miss deductions or don’t exploit tax breaks designed to lower the costs of education, retirement, and health care.

The Internal Revenue Service is asking tax professionals to refrain from directing their clients to call the IRS’s e-help desk, saying that it is causing longer hold times on the phone line, which is only supposed to be used by practitioners.

With minutes counting down to this year's tax deadline, clients (and many of their accountants) are scrambling to get paperwork wrapped up on time. But many financial and tax professionals caution that in the heat of the moment, even the most knowledgeable can forget the basics – never mind easy-to-miss, specialized strategies.

The IRS is giving clients who got a wrong 1095-A limited relief from tax penalties.

Tax professionals share how they handle clients who bother them too much.