Tax Strategies

As tax prep suites have evolved to meet the needs of the particular market segment targeted by each product, practitioners now have a variety of products from which to choose - each of which will do the job."The desktop market is becoming extremely competitive, with each producer giving as much new functionality and offering it as cheaply as they can," said John Vora, chief executive of Parsippany, N.J.-based TaxSimple.

The Internal Revenue Service position on Circular 230 monetary penalties has generated concern and comments from the American Institute of CPAs, while the American Bar Association Tax Section intends to submit its own comments on the matter.The penalties were announced in Notice 2007-39 earlier this year to implement Section 822 of the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, which expanded the sanctions that the IRS can impose for certain prohibited conduct to include monetary penalties.

Former football player O.J. Simpson, singer Dionne Warwick and comedian Sinbad were among the celebrities who showed up on California's Delinquent Taxpayers list.

The Internal Revenue Service said that personal exemptions and standard deductions would rise and tax brackets would widen as it adjusted a variety of tax provisions for 2008 to keep pace with inflation.

The Internal Revenue Service said that Form 1120-A, U.S. Corporation Short-Form Income Tax Return, is now obsolete.

The Social Security Administration said monthly benefits would increase 2.3 percent for more than 54 million Americans in 2008.

Scandal-scarred health care provider HealthSouth scored $440 million in a tax recovery from the Internal Revenue Service despite the company's acknowledgment of financial fraud.

The House of Representatives has approved a bill that would ban private tax collections, but the bill's prospects remain uncertain in the Senate.

Ernst & Young has been named by a law firm that has filed a submission with the Internal Revenue Service's Whistleblower Office, claiming that one of the accounting firm's Fortune 500 clients improperly reduced its taxes by $1 billion through a series of transactions.

The Internal Revenue Service is not doing a good job of managing its paper case files, according to a newly released report.