Germany’s Deutsche Bank has reached a settlement -- reportedly in the tens of millions of dollars -- with hundreds of investors to whom it sold questionable legal tax shelters in the 1990s.

A provision in the president's budget proposals could shelter 529 college-savings plans from being counted in determining federal student financial aid.

Following up on threats concerning possible tax-preparer fraud and blatant abuse of the phone tax refund, the Internal Revenue Service announced it is taking additional steps to ensure preparers and taxpayers are making accurate requests for the one-time refund.

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has taken National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson to task over her recent annual report to Congress.

President Bush’s 2008 budget has tabbed $11.4 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, a direct appropriation increase of 6.3 percent from the agency’s 2007 budget.

Everyone in Washington seems to be in agreement that there needs to be a better way of closing the tax gap, but like the other problems facing the Internal Revenue Service, there’s seems to be little Beltway consensus over how to meaningfully tackle the problem.It wasn’t lost on me that the same week that the IRS released its 2008 budget proposal --complete with a number of legislative proposals, a Congressman and the National Taxpayer Advocate continued to spar over the future of one of the agency’s newer attempts to combat the tax gap -- the outsourcing of simple collection cases to private companies as part of a pilot program.

As part of the White House’s proposed $2.9 trillion budget plan for the 2008 fiscal year, President Bush announced an effort aimed at significantly tightening the tax gap.