Tax

New York and Philadelphia have been provoking the ire of their residents lately by levying taxes on two formerly sacrosanct local products.

Taxpayers will be able to receive their income tax refunds on a reloadable prepaid Western Union MoneyWise MasterCard next tax season as a result of a new agreement that CCH Small Firm Services has struck with Western Union.

President Barack Obama blasted Senate Republicans for obstructing his administration’s top legislative priority: a bill providing tax cuts and a $32 billion lending fund for small businesses to spur job growth.

The real estate developer who is trying to set up a controversial Islamic cultural center two blocks away from Ground Zero reportedly owes New York City over $224,270 in back property taxes for the location.

H&R Block has teamed up with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City to offer an online calculator that can help small businesses understand the financial impact of health care reform and determine their health insurance savings by using tax credits under the bill.

Intuit is looking to take scan-and-populate technology to the next level with the release of ProLine Tax Import, designed to allow tax professionals to import tax data from scanned source documents and digitally download data from financial institutions directly into Intuit Lacerte and Intuit ProSeries.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, pushed for an extension of the Bush tax cuts on Tuesday, but questioned the need to pass over 70 other tax break extensions that failed to pass in the Senate in June.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the federal budget deficit for 2010 will exceed $1.3 trillion—$71 billion below last year's total and $27 billion lower than the amount that CBO projected in March 2010, when it issued its previous estimate, but that projection is predicated on the Bush tax cuts and other tax breaks expiring.

A federal appeals court has ruled against New York City in its bid to collect about $47 million in property taxes from two foreign governments that have been using parts of their United Nations missions for non-diplomatic purposes.

Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., has proposed a set of tax breaks to encourage investment in the commercial space industry as a way to cushion the blow from recent cutbacks in the space program.