Tax

More than 27,000 health care providers who were paid by Medicare had unpaid payroll and other federal tax debts totaling over $2 billion in 2006, according to a study by the Government Accountability Office.

The Internal Revenue Service is trying to cope with rising gas prices by increasing the optional standard mileage rates that taxpayers can use to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile.

The late comedian George Carlin had a $3 million tax debt that took him about two decades to pay off, but he credited the debt with keeping him working as a comic.

The Internal Revenue Service has waived some limitations of the low-income housing tax credit in Indiana and Iowa so that owners of facilities in these states can provide housing to victims of recent storms and flooding.

Questions about economic stimulus payments and tax rebates kept the phones buzzing at Internal Revenue Service offices and cost the IRS a considerable chunk of its budget.

Calculations of economic stimulus payments by the Internal Revenue Service may have been wrong in nearly 400,000 cases.

The Internal Revenue Service said that about 5.2 million retirees and disabled veterans who qualify for economic stimulus payments have not filed to claim the payments.

A former UBS banker, Bradley Birkenfeld, pled guilty to conspiring with an American billionaire real estate developer, Swiss bankers and co-defendant Mario Staggl to help the developer evade paying $7.2 million in taxes by helping him conceal $200 million of assets in Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

Milwaukee Brewers first baseman Prince Fielder reportedly owes the Internal Revenue Service a tax debt of $409,149, and the IRS has filed a lien against him to collect it.

Charles Merrill, a self-made millionaire and cousin of the co-founder of Merrill Lynch, could end up serving three years or more in jail for not filing income taxes since beginning a tax protest in 2004.