Tax

The Internal Revenue Service said it plans to simplify the signature process for electronically filed individual tax returns by allowing tax practitioners to avoid the need to send a paper signature document in support of their clients' e-filed returns.

The American Institute of CPAs wants Congress to modify a little-noticed provision in the recently passed Iraq war-funding bill that the institute fears may put tax preparers at odds with their clients.

The Internal Revenue Service said it has begun mailing educational letters this month to more than 650,000 small tax-exempt organizations to let them know they need to start submitting a new annual electronic notice known as an e-Postcard.Form 990-N, the electronic notice they have to send, is intended for tax-exempt organizations with gross receipts of $25,000 or less. Until the passage of the Pension Protection Act of 2006, charities of that size weren't required to submit either the Form 990 or 990-EZ.

CCH has integrated its CertiTax software and Sales Tax Load Utilities with Microsoft Dynamics GP 10.0.The company's CertiTax Plug-in for Dynamics GP 10.0 provides an interface from CertiTax, CCH's hosted sales tax calculation system, to the Dynamics GP 10.0 sales order process module.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, (D-Mont.), and fellow committee member Chuck Grassley, (R-Iowa), are calling on the Internal Revenue Service to do a better job of publicizing the Saver's Credit to encourage more low-to-middle-income workers to save money for retirement.The credit applies to up to 50 percent of the first $2,000 of retirement contributions for families earning up to $50,000 a year. First created in 2001, the credit became permanent in the Pension Protection Act of 2006.

The Internal Revenue Service said it would add three more excise tax forms to the lineup of federal tax return forms and schedules that taxpayers can file electronically.The first form that will be available for e-filing is the 2290, Heavy Highway Vehicle Use Tax Return, debuting this summer. Form 720, Quarterly Federal Excise Tax Return, and Form 8849, Claim for Refund of Excise Taxes, will premiere later this year.

The IRS said it is reconsidering some of the private letter rulings its associate chief counsel’s office has issued regarding the gift tax consequences of trusts that employ distribution committees.The IRS’s chief counsel has discovered that some of the conclusions in the rulings may disagree with some prior revenue rules.

Intentional disregard of the law is the primary contributor to the tax collection gap experienced by the IRS, according to nearly half the CPAs surveyed in an online poll by the AICPA.

CCH said it will begin reselling tax exemption certificate management software and services from Imaging Science and Services Inc. on an exclusive basis worldwide.The products automate the organization of sales tax exemption and resale certificates. They include TeamsExpress on Demand, a hosted system for managing a database of tax documents, and LineLinkXL, a Microsoft Excel add-in.

Thomson Tax & Accounting released Version 8.0 of its ePropertyTax software, adding extra edit, query and data entry features to the Web-based system for commercial property taxpayers.The upgrade expands the mass-editing tool to help users copy, paste, import and export data throughout the system. Users can now customize queries in any data field to search for information.