Tax

Your client has a successful closely held business. Perhaps your client has already indicated that, at some indeterminate point in the future, the business will be sold. Even if your client has not given such an indication, you are well advised to at least broach the topic as a matter of long-term contingency planning.

The former manager of an H&R Block outlet has been sentenced to 12 months and one day in federal prison for using the identities of his former tax preparation clients to file false returns with the Internal Revenue Service seeking fraudulent income tax refunds.

Conservative economist Dr. Arthur Laffer has co-written a study that identified a positive economic impact in efforts to require online retailers to collect sales taxes from customers on Internet purchases.

The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has produced an action plan at the request of the G20 finance ministers to address the problems of base erosion and profit shifting that are depleting corporate tax revenue as multinational companies transfer their profits to low-tax countries.

Captive insurance companies, once the exotic plaything of large corporations, are now open and advantageous to much smaller companies. But most accountants don’t know enough about captive insurance companies to advise their business clients on the advantages of starting their own, according to Brian McCormick and Jerry Messick of Elevate Captives LLC.

For some companies that got a temporary reprieve from the IRS in the height of the recession, the payback isn’t going to be as bad as they expected.

CCH said it has been selected for the ninth straight year by the Internal Revenue Service to deliver sales tax rate and taxability tables to help millions of Americans prepare their tax returns.

The Taxpayer Protection Program that the Internal Revenue Service implemented in an effort to curb the problem of identity theft-related tax fraud is improving the IRS’s efforts at detecting identity theft, but the case-processing controls need to be strengthened to reduce the burden on taxpayers victimized by identity theft, according to a new government report.

The unthinkable happened to me. My office was burglarized and a computer stolen containing all of my clients’ personal information! This is my cautionary tale to my colleagues—we have become targets in the IRS identity theft epidemic.

Sales tax and compliance automation service Avalara has formed a strategic alliance with AGN International-North America Inc. which will enable firms to access sales and use tax (SUT) and value added tax (VAT) information and related resources.