Tax

About 52 percent of Americans intend to spend their annual tax refund on necessary expenses such as loans, credit cards and other household expenses, while another 30 percent plan to put the money into savings and only 8 percent plan to invest the tax refund money, according to a new survey.

The American Institute of CPAs has sent a letter outlining a set of legislative proposals to the leaders of Congress’s two main tax committees, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee, recommending ways to simplify the tax laws and make them fairer.

Forty-five percent of the 1,000 investors in a recent survey expect to receive a tax refund, and among them, 61 percent plan to save or invest the money, according to a poll by TD Ameritrade

Group-of-20 nations agreed to implement a global standard for automatically exchanging information between tax authorities by the end of 2015, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said.

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen took some time off from his busy filing season schedule to discuss some questions posed by our readers and staff.

The Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service released a final package of regulations Thursday to implement the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act and amend the regulations to align them with existing tax rules.

The U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations will hold a hearing next week on a crackdown on offshore tax evasion that has stalled as prosecutors conduct criminal probes of 14 banks, including Credit Suisse Group AG.

The top Republican tax writer in Congress will release a draft plan to revamp the U.S. tax code amid political odds that are stacked against him.

The Internal Revenue Service has released a Transfer Pricing Audit Roadmap to help the transfer pricing specialists in its Large Business & International division successfully audit the tax strategies of multinational companies.

Thomson Reuters has introduced Checkpoint Learning CPE courses for the Apple iPad.