Tax

In a political victory for Republicans, President Bush signed the sixth tax cut in the past six years yesterday, in a Rose Garden ceremony.

Hispanics are less likely than non-Hispanics to say that they owe money to the Internal Revenue Service for 2005 (14 percent versus 22 percent) and they are more likely than non-Hispanics to report having received a refund for 2004 (73 percent versus 62 percent), according to poll results released by Hispanic market research firm Encuesta Inc.

A federal judge has sentenced Richard Hatch, who won the first season of the CBS reality show "Survivor," to 51 months in prison for tax evasion.

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously denied a taxpayer group's challenge to nearly $300 million in tax breaks given to a DaimlerChrysler AG plant in Toledo, Ohio.

The Internal Revenue Service said that it plans to revoke the tax-exempt status of the 41 credit counseling agencies it has audited as part of a crackdown on the industry's practices.

I have dealt with many tax acts in the 30-plus years that I have been in professional publishing. When I worked at a tax publisher, I know tax legislation meant an awful lot of work. In one way or another, I would be involved in assembling the Code-as-amended, analyzing the effective dates, excerpting legislative committee reports, and writing or reviewing analyses. Besides the work, the legislation would almost always seemed to come down at a bad time, usually at the end of the year as Congress was about to adjourn. It was a real pain.

Internet tax research is becoming platform "agnostic," as a researcher can access, link to and search multiple sources from a single platform.BNA's Tax Management Portfolios are available across a wide array of platforms, including CCH's Tax Research Network, RIA's Checkpoint, and LexisNexis. CCH's TRN allows a search not only of CCH proprietary material, but also of key industry Web sites and, using Google, the entire Internet. Checkpoint now includes access to BNA, Practitioners Publishing Co. and Warren Gorham & Lamont titles. The newly launched LexisNexis Tax Center integrates material from CCH, Kleinrock and Tax Analysts, as well as sister company Matthew Bender. And Intuit's Tax Almanac provides a sounding board for practitioners to pool their knowledge to solve specific tax problems.

The people behind the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse are celebrating a recent court victory that reinstated the nonprofit organization's access to statistical data from the Internal Revenue Service.The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington handed down a decision in April stating that the IRS must comply with TRAC's request for data.

Tax research and software provider RIA has upgraded its proprietary Checkpoint service to include expansion of user access to BNA content, international standards and titles from sibling Thomson company PPC.The company, headquartered here, said that, as part of the upgrade, the service will now make available more than 90 PPC auditing, tax and accounting titles, including its Guide to Public Company Audits and 1040 Deskbook materials.

On the heels of last month's Government Accountability Office study on the errors committed by commercial chain tax preparers, the legislative push toward preparer registration and licensing appears to have gained considerable traction."With the bills introduced last year and this latest report, it looks like preparer registration is on its way," opined John Hewitt, chief executive of Virginia Beach, Va.-based Liberty Tax Service. "We're going to do that internally. We've already taken steps to implement our own certification program in advance of any legislation."