Tax

The House has voted to approve a $78 billion bill that would provide a temporary fix to prevent the alternative minimum tax from spreading to about 23 million more taxpayers this coming tax season.Congress was under pressure to pass an AMT fix in time to allow the Internal Revenue Service to produce the necessary tax forms without delaying processing and refunds. However, in a sign of the controversy over provisions to raise taxes on some high-income taxpayers and close loopholes, no Republicans voted for the bill and eight Democrats voted against it.

The current wrangling over the alternative minimum tax is a symptom of the larger problems with having a Tax Code built on patchwork over nearly a century, to the point that it resembles a Rube Goldberg contraption, according to David A. Lifson, president of the New York State Society of CPAs and a co-managing partner at New York-based Hays & Co. LLP.Lifson, who recently testified before the Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee on the AMT, also chaired the NYSSCPA Committee on Tax Reform that issued a comprehensive proposal to revise the current tax system.

One week after Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., introduced his massive, dream tax reform proposal, and after acknowledging that that proposal had no chance of passage this year, Chairman Rangel introduced a more modest stop-gap proposal, H.R. 3996, including primarily one-year fixes for expiring provisions and some proposals to address the mortgage crisis.Most commentators seem to feel that this legislation has a fairly good chance of passing this year in something close to its present form.

The Internal Revenue Service said that the amounts paid for certain diagnostic procedures and devices, such as an annual physical examination, a full-body electronic scan and a pregnancy test kit, qualify as deductible medical care expenses if they are not otherwise compensated.

For tax year 2007, the Internal Revenue Service has implemented a new policy that assumes an e-mail substitute form submission has been approved if the IRS does not otherwise notify the taxpayer who submits it within 20 business days.

The U.S. Senate has passed a version of the energy bill after removing a controversial tax increase on major oil and gas producers from the version approved by the House.

The House passed a new version of its patch for the alternative minimum tax that eliminates a controversial provision to raise taxes on the carried interest earnings of managers of private equity firms and hedge funds.

A former Internal Revenue Service agent has pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court to engaging in a scheme in which he attempted to sell to other taxpayers the purported tax losses of a company he owned, as well as use them on his own individual tax returns.

The Internal Revenue Service said that payments under the Department of Veterans Affairs' Compensated Work Therapy (CWT) program are no longer taxable and disabled veterans who paid tax on these benefits in the past three years can now claim refunds.

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