Tax season

Practitioners tend to view tax season with mixed feelings. On the downside, there's getting clients to send you the data you need to construct their return, and determining how much of what they give you is actually germane to the return.

Recently, a former colleague whom I had worked with during an overlong apprenticeship at a local daily newspaper announced that he was taking on a second career after nearly a quarter century of toiling in some form of media or another. After whining for years how much he was paying his accountant to prepare his taxes and pointing out how his journalist's compensation package didn't exactly rival Rupert Murdoch's, he somehow envisioned a second act as a paid tax preparer moonlighting for a large franchise which shall remain anonymous. Sort of like the occupational version of a mid-life crisis, sans the Harley or the super-charged Camaro.

H&R Block said Monday that it plans to add another 100 franchise locations to its 11,000-office network.

H&R Block has made the decision not to offer refund anticipation loans next year, a result of the RAL business getting a lot harder for tax prep chains to operate in lately.

The Internal Revenue Service released the specifications on Tuesday for the competency test that individuals must pass to become a Registered Tax Return Preparer.

Undercover investigators from the Treasury Department posing as taxpayers who needed customer service from the Internal Revenue Service were kept waiting for up to four hours in IRS offices and in some cases told to come back another day.

The average fee for preparing an itemized federal and state individual tax return was $233 during the 2011 tax season, only a 1.7 percent increase over 2009.

The Internal Revenue Service plans to send letters to approximately 100,000 tax return preparers who it said Tuesday failed to follow its new registration requirements.

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.

After achieving its strongest e-filing tax season to date with more than 11 million tax returns transmitted through its ProSystem fx Tax and Global fx Tax compliance solutions, CCH has earned a 97-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal 1040 individual tax returns and a 98-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal business tax returns, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s Software Error Reject Code Report.

Check out the digital edition of the June 2011 issue of Accounting Today.

Late legislation, a hold on e-filing Schedule A returns and a later deadline for delivery of Form 1099s were among the factors that caused the past tax season to be more compressed than usual.

Jackson Hewitt Tax Service filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, but said it has reached a definitive agreement with its secured lenders on a restructuring plan.

The National Society of Accountants has begun offering a new self-study course to prepare for the exam that the Internal Revenue Service will require all registered tax return preparers to pass.

The Justice Department has filed an antitrust lawsuit to prevent H&R Block from acquiring the company that develops the tax software TaxAct.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has proposed a $2 million fine against Republic Bank & Trust Co. after the bank tried to coach tax preparers using its refund anticipation loan products on how to respond in case the FDIC visited them.

An interactive, Web-based tool is helping Internal Revenue Service employees to provide customer-specific tax law responses efficiently and accurately, according to a new government report.

CCH Small Firm Services has transferred its Electronic Filing Center reporting system from an Oracle database to Microsoft technology.

Nearly 1,200 Electronic Filing Identification Numbers were reported to the Internal Revenue Service as compromised over a five-year period, allowing an individual to electronically submit a federal income tax return using another individual’s EFIN without that person's knowledge, according to a new report.

One of the added chores of preparing tax returns is dealing with clients who receive notices from the IRS. Typically, the IRS issues several million notices a year, commonly because information on a return doesn’t match information reported to the IRS on a Form 1099.