Tax

Back-to-school time in Massachusetts isn’t just celebrated by stir-crazy parents. It’s also a chance to shop sales tax free—or at least it was, until the state decided not to reinstate its sales-tax holiday this August for the first time since 2009 due to slowing state revenue.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service have issued proposed regulations that would eliminate a tax-planning strategy for minimizing estate and gift taxes.

Highlights of some of our favorite tax-related blogs from the past week.

Transfer pricing documentation rules have come to the fore with the United Kingdom’s Brexit.

The Internal Revenue Service is seeing a big increase this summer in automated phone calls from con artists pretending to work for the IRS calling innocent taxpayers demanding overdue taxes.

A Swiss banker used a toothpaste tube a decade ago to smuggle diamonds into the U.S. Prosecutors now say an Israeli bank employee devised a new way to help a U.S. client hide assets from the Internal Revenue Service: She carried account statements into the country on a USB flash drive concealed in her necklace.

A roundup of our favorite recent tax fraud cases.

Many taxpayers have multiple Individual Retirement Accounts and 401(k) accounts, and as the baby boom generation enters its retirement years, more clients than ever are going to need advice from a tax professional about how to handle the complicated rules for required minimum distributions from the accounts once they finally retire.

Massachusetts decided this year to cancel its sales tax holiday, and in the years ahead other states may decide to follow suit.

Facebook Inc.’s future cash flows and results could suffer a major blow if it loses a battle over new U.S. tax liabilities related to the transfer of its global operations to Ireland in 2010.