Tax

H&R Block has teamed up with the mobile personal finance service Pageonce to provide a tool that allows do-it-yourself filers to track the status of their tax refunds from a mobile device.

The accounting profession’s drive for a more predictable and user friendly Federal Tax Code seems to be gaining traction with at least one segment of Congress: the freshly-elected corps of Tea Party activists and their conservative allies in the House and Senate.

Nearly 19 million tax returns have been filed with the Internal Revenue Service from home computers so far this year, an increase of almost 6 percent compared to the number of returns from the same time last year, the IRS said Friday.

Tax reform for business isn’t just about lowering the corporate tax rate. That’s what Patricia Thompson, chair of the AICPA’s Tax Executive Committee, told the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures yesterday.

The House moved one step closer to repealing the expanded 1099 information reporting requirements in the Affordable Care Act and Small Business Jobs Act on Wednesday by approving a controversial offset to the cost of the repeal.

The Senate Finance Committee convened a hearing Tuesday aimed at making the Tax Code fairer and simpler, while making U.S. businesses more competitive.

A group calling itself US Uncut organized a series of protests over the weekend at Bank of America branches across the country to protest large corporations with unpaid income taxes.

Responding to press reports that the Obama administration is considering hitting small business with more tax hikes, U.S. Senator Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, called on the White House to take these tax increases off the table that threaten to “destroy the economic recovery our nation deserves.”

Halfpricesoft.com has added data import and upload features to the new edition of ezW2, its software for filing W2 and 1099 forms.

Whether or not the Obama administration budget proposal to add some clarity to worker classification sees the light of day, the employee vs. independent contractor issue will surely be undergoing increased scrutiny.