Tax

President Obama used his weekly address to say it was necessary to raise taxes on the wealthy to help close the budget deficit.

In March of this year, we devoted this column to the Internal Revenue Service's newly announced 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative for disclosing income from foreign accounts and assets. Key features of the program are an Aug. 31, 2011, deadline, an eight-year disclosure period, a maximum 25 percent penalty for failure to disclose, reduced 12.5 or 5 percent penalties in specified situations, and various documentation and disclosures required with the submission.

IMGCAP(1)]Accountants, insurance professionals and others need to be careful that they don’t become what the IRS calls material advisors.

PDI Global, which is part of the Tax & Accounting business of Thomson Reuters, has released its 2011-2012 Tax Planning Guide.

After achieving its strongest e-filing tax season to date with more than 11 million tax returns transmitted through its ProSystem fx Tax and Global fx Tax compliance solutions, CCH has earned a 97-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal 1040 individual tax returns and a 98-percent electronic acceptance rate for federal business tax returns, according to the Internal Revenue Service’s Software Error Reject Code Report.

President Obama took Republican lawmakers to task during a news conference Wednesday for inflexibly refusing to compromise on taxes as part of a deal to raise the debt limit.

U.S.-based multinational corporations and their lobbyists are pushing hard for a so-called “tax holiday” that would repatriate the earnings from their foreign subsidiaries, arguing that it would inject up to $1 trillion into the U.S. economy, but the prospects for job growth are murky at best.

California Governor Jerry Brown and Democratic lawmakers have struck a deal to close the state’s estimated $15 billion budget deficit, including provisions to force online retailers like Amazon.com to collect sales tax from customers.

Governments around the world are either increasing indirect taxes such as value-added taxes or introducing them for the first time.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has exited from negotiations over resolving the problem of the looming debt ceiling, saying he is unable to agree to any tax increases.