Tax

President Obama called for tax reform measures Monday to cut the budget deficit by $1.5 trillion in his fiscal year 2013 budget.

The legislation passed by Congress at the end of 2010 to extend the Bush tax rates for another two years is bad news for estate planning practitioners.

The Internal Revenue Service is reminding tax preparers that they need to complete 15 hours of continuing education, starting this year, under new requirements, and has posted a list of approved providers.

The IRS effort to combat identity theft couldn’t have come at a better time. With the IRS closing in on its goal of 80 percent e-filed returns (aided in part by the e-filing mandates on return preparers), the last thing it needs is a decline in confidence in the system. Yet that’s just what has happened, according to a survey commissioned by tax software developer Taxsoftware.com.

The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy is awarding $25,000 in grants to academicians and post-doctoral researchers to research educational issues that affect CPAs, the public accounting professions and the responsibility of state accounting boards to protect the public.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on the interaction of tax and financial accounting rules on tax reform.

Intuit has made several updates to its Tax Research and Tax Import for Lacerte and ProSeries products, in response to a recent survey of accounting professionals.

A pair of Democratic senators who chair influential committees have introduced legislation aimed at closing a variety of tax loopholes to reduce the budget deficit.

The Internal Revenue Service has released an expanded version of its smartphone application, IRS2Go, with a new YouTube video feature and additional tax help for taxpayers.

The tax refund delays this tax season could be tied not only to new identity theft detection filters, but also to overly tight business rules written into the IRS’s Electronic Fraud Detection System.