Banking firm HVB Group will pay $29.6 million in fines and restitution to avoid criminal prosecution from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service, settling charges that it helped wealthy Americans evade more than $500 million in taxes.

Internal Revenue Service officials announced that their latest estimates of the tax gap for the 2001 tax year comes to $345 billion.

Turns out in between the normal gossip, my friends and family had somehow neglected to spread a juicy bit of exciting Ocean State news with me -- I'm talking of course about the flat tax proposal that came out of the Rhode Island House of Representatives in early February.

IRS OPENS 2006 FILING SEASON: The Internal Revenue Service sent out 17.7 million 1040 tax packages during the first week of January to taxpayers who have previously filed paper returns. The number of paper tax booklets being mailed to Americans continues to decline as more people opt for electronic filing.The IRS expects to process about 135 million individual tax returns in 2006 and to see continued growth for its e-filing service. The agency passed a milestone last year as more than half the nation's taxpayers filed their tax returns electronically.

More than half of all professional liability claims against accountants are tax-related, according to insurance industry executives. As accountants plunge ahead into their busy season, they should take note of their increasing exposure.Although audit malpractice claims are the highest in terms of severity, the most frequent claims are those for tax services, said Joe Wolfe, assistant vice president for risk control at CNA, in an interview last fall. CNA is the underwriter for the American Institute of CPAs' professional liability insurance program.

In violation of a longstanding court order, the Internal Revenue Service has stopped providing detailed statistics about how the agency enforces the nation's tax laws, according to a motion filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington.The legal challenge was brought by Susan B. Long, a professor of management information and decision sciences at Syracuse University's Martin J.Whitman School of Management. Long has used the IRS data to document its performance for more than 30 years. Since 1989 she also has been co-director of the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-research organization that provides the public with detailed information about the operation of hundreds of federal agencies, including the IRS.

Practitioners and industry observers concur with the call by Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson for tax simplification.Although legislation calls for the Taxpayer Advocate to list at least 20 of the most serious problems facing taxpayers, Olson went a step further and included a major section on tax simplification.