Republican presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., have each refused to sign a pledge not to raise taxes if either is elected as the nation’s chief executive.

Regardless of which of the multiple return dates applied to taxpayers, e-filed returns during the 2007 filing season began pouring in early in the process and kept coming at a steady pace.

Nearly three decades ago, California enacted Proposition 13, a highly debated piece of legislation that limited property taxes to 1 percent of the full value of the property, and reduced them statewide by an average of 57 percent.Today, a swelling number of grassroots movements in several states that are protesting skyrocketing property taxes and filing appeals may usher in the question of whether the U.S. will one day need similar legislation on a national level.

Former Internal Revenue Service district director Jesse Ayala Cota pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States through his involvement in a tax fraud scheme promoted by the Topeka, Kansas-based organization Renaissance, The Tax People Inc.Cota admitted in his plea agreement that from 1997 through April 2002, the conspirators, through Renaissance, operated a scheme to defraud the government by marketing a program designed to sell illegal tax deductions through false and misleading representations.

After learning that more than 450,000 federal workers and retirees owe a whopping $3 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, the Senate Finance Committee is urging the president to step up efforts to collect from those delinquent employees.Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to President Bush requesting that he remind the delinquent federal employees and warn them of the consequences of non-compliance.

Tax practitioners looking to Congress, the Treasury or the Patent Office for a solution to the perceived problem of tax strategy patents may instead have found some assistance from an expected source - the Supreme Court.A unanimous Supreme Court, in the case of KSR v. Teleflex, decided on April 30, 2007, overturned a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and found a patent claim invalid. In doing so, the high court also criticized the Federal Circuit for applying the wrong standard on patent claims and being too liberal in upholding patent claims for obvious improvements.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has sent a letter to his chamber colleagues in an attempt to blunt what he termed "inaccurate claims" about the private collectors employed by the Internal Revenue Service.In a "Dear Colleague" letter, Grassley pointed out that the agency's own collection infrastructure is better set up for placing liens and garnishing wages than it is for making initial phone calls to delinquent taxpayers to set up a payment plan.