Tax Strategies

The worldwide decline in top personal income tax rates over the past seven years has come to an end, as this year’s average rate increased 0.3 percent globally.

While some states are now passing legislation that favors lenders, at the same time there are tantalizing federal and state tax benefits being offered to distressed homeowners who are facing foreclosure or considering short-selling.

Recently, I received a blast e-mail from a group who identified themselves as "concerned citizens" of my town. Without getting into shopworn specifics that most of you would not care about, these self-appointed monitors of fiscal prudence decried rising taxes and exhorted the local government to rescind a quasi-moratorium on development in order to generate more tax revenue.

Online bookkeeping service Outright.com has signed a partnership with H&R Block aimed at helping small-business owners deal with the increasing complexity of income taxes.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, criticized the U.S. Small Business Administration after it missed a deadline to send comments to the Treasury Department and the IRS about a controversial new 1099 reporting requirement for businesses.

The Supreme Court kicked off its new term on Monday with a brand new justice who will be hearing about a number of tax cases, at least when she doesn’t have to recuse herself.

The lame duck session slated to begin in mid-November leaves Congress a massive amount of unfinished business.

The American Institute of CPAs and 18 other groups have written a letter to congressional leaders encouraging them to ban tax strategy patents before adjourning.

Senate Republicans blocked a bill on Tuesday that would have denied tax breaks to companies that move jobs offshore and provide companies with a two-year holiday from their share of Social Security payroll tax withholding for each employee they hire to replace a worker at a foreign-based facility.

The Senate debated a bill on Monday that would give companies a two-year holiday from their share of Social Security payroll withholding for each employee they hire to replace a worker at a foreign-based facility.