Tax Strategies

After three years bouncing between British courts, tennis player Andre Agassi lost a $52,000 tax dispute that will require other sports and entertainments stars from paying U.K. income tax on endorsement deals.

While the extension of the reduced rates on capital gains and dividends, alternative minimum tax relief, and the continuation of enhanced Section 179 expensing have received the most publicity, there are a host of other changes in the Tax Increase Prevention and Reconciliation Act of 2005.

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.