Tax

The American Institute of CPAs is asking the Internal Revenue Service to reconsider some of the fees it plans to charge for competency exams and fingerprinting as part of its tax preparer oversight program.

Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., and Kay Hagan, D-N.C., introduced legislation Thursday allowing multinational corporations to repatriate their foreign earnings at a reduced tax rate.

The Internal Revenue Service issued proposed regulations Thursday that would require tax preparers to file a due diligence checklist with any federal tax return claiming the Earned Income Tax Credit, starting next year.

President Barack Obama said Thursday he was “comfortable” with the changes made by Senate Democrats in his jobs bill on Wednesday, including a 5.6 percent surtax on millionaires starting in 2013.

A new government report recommends that Congress amend the Tax Code to allow the Internal Revenue Service to assess penalties against tax preparers who fail to comply with the electronic filing mandate.

SaaS-based sales tax automation service provider Avalara released AvaTax 1099, a cloud-based offering for 1099 reporting that leverages a new strategic partnership with SaaS-based tax information reporting company Convey.

With the exception of Spain, Luxembourg, Ireland, and a few other countries, most nations did not increase their top personal income tax rate this past year despite revenue pressures, according to a new report from KPMG.

Practitioners tend to view tax season with mixed feelings. On the downside, there's getting clients to send you the data you need to construct their return, and determining how much of what they give you is actually germane to the return.

Recently, a former colleague whom I had worked with during an overlong apprenticeship at a local daily newspaper announced that he was taking on a second career after nearly a quarter century of toiling in some form of media or another. After whining for years how much he was paying his accountant to prepare his taxes and pointing out how his journalist's compensation package didn't exactly rival Rupert Murdoch's, he somehow envisioned a second act as a paid tax preparer moonlighting for a large franchise which shall remain anonymous. Sort of like the occupational version of a mid-life crisis, sans the Harley or the super-charged Camaro.

The Internal Revenue Service needs to take additional steps in order to expand its audits to include returns from prior or subsequent years when taxpayers being audited may owe substantial taxes.