Tax

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.

I first came across the term a number of years ago when consultants stressed to me the importance of identifying where a business was in its life cycle. These consultants believed businesses and industries have a life cycle, and the key is identifying where the business is at that time. In the case of a business, its life cycle includes progressive identifiable stages, such as the “seed,” start-up, growth, established, etc.

Mahoney Cohen & Co. CPA PC has launched an international tax and consulting practice.

India’s Supreme Court found that Morgan Stanley did not have to pay tax in that country for income earned from its business process outsourcing unit, giving multinational companies a lift in their outsourcing arrangements.

Now that summer is here, tax preparers have time for trial runs of different software to see if there's a program that might be a better fit for their practices.Vendors, meanwhile, see this time as an opportunity to get a head start on the next filing season by offering special discounts and promotional pricing.

CONGRESS EYES INTERNET TAXESWASHINGTON, D.C. - Two bills circulating on Capitol Hill are looking at different ways to generate tax revenue from the Internet.

Blues singer Robert Cray is singing the blues about his accountants, and taking them to court. Cray filed a suit in Los Angeles Superior Court against Chapnick, Smuckler & Associates, and its principals Jerry Chapnick and Keith Smuckler, according to CBS. He accuses the firm of cheating him, his wife, and their company, charging them with fraud, negligence, and breach of contract and fiduciary duty. The Crays claim the firm did not inform them it was drawing up to $235,000 from their credit line. They say Chapnick, Smuckler also did not check on whether the Crays were entitled to a $55,000 refund in taxes they paid in the United Kingdom. In addition, the Crays blame the firm for a $2,000 penalty on unpaid property taxes. After they engaged the firm around the end of 2001, the Crays learned the firm was not licensed to operate in the state of California. They sacked the firm in August 2006.