Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash The Internal Revenue Service relies on taxpayers voluntarily filing correct tax returns and paying the tax amount shown on those forms. Millions will be doing just that tomorrow, Oct. 16, to comply with the extended filing deadline. Unfortunately, however, too many people find ways to avoid paying the U.S. Treasury what they legitimately owe. They are why the latest update on the Tax Gap shows it has grown. A lot. The Tax Gap is the amount of money the IRS is owed, but which it hasn't been able to collect. The agency's latest estimates... Read more →
Audit
A rare annular, or ring of fire, solar eclipse is tomorrow, Oct. 14. NASA has more on the event. And if it's cloudy where you live or you're not in a prime viewing region, you can livestream the eclipse. October already is the spookiest month of the year, but things ramp up this weekend. Today, in case you haven't looked at a calendar, is Friday the 13th. Tomorrow, Saturday, Oct. 14, millions in the Americas will experience, at least in part, a rare annular solar eclipse. In the United States, the event will begin in Oregon around 9:13 a.m. Pacific... Read more →
Your next "welcome to your new job" handshake could be at the Internal Revenue Service. (Photo: Unsplash+ in collaboration with Ahmet Kurt) A key part of the Internal Revenue Service's plan to increase taxpayer compliance is personnel. It takes people to track down and confirm they, or their businesses, owe taxes. So the IRS is looking to hire 3,700 employees nationwide. Specifically, the agency is seeking people, preferably experienced accountants, to serve as revenue agents. Revenue agent special skills: IRS revenue agents, known officially as Internal Revenue Agents, serve as technical experts in examinations of significant and complicated tax compliance... Read more →
Photo by Max Burchill on Unsplash To paraphrase a gazillion social media posts, exploitative people are why we can't have needed tax breaks. OK, Congress plays a big part. And the Internal Revenue Service too often steps on its own tax toes. But in many cases, unscrupulous people mess things up for the rest of us who are just trying to comply with tax laws and get a little bit of legitimate tax relief along the way. That's what happened with the Employee Retention Credit (ERC). This refundable tax credit was created by lawmakers to help businesses that were struggling... Read more →
Source: IRS The Earned Income Tax Credit was one of the many tax matters mentioned in the Internal Revenue Service's Sept. 8 announcement that, thanks to Inflation Reduction Act funds, it is revising its enforcement efforts. The tax agency's primary goal, per it's news release, is to restore fairness to the tax system. To do that, IRS personnel will focus more on high-earning taxpayers, both individuals and businesses, that have seen sharp drops in audit rates over the last decade. EITC audit reforms on the way: Change also are planned in how the IRS deals with the millions of taxpayers... Read more →
IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, pictured at a Senate Finance Committee hearing in February, today announced the agency's new, expansive plans to enforce federal tax laws in a more equitable way. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of the Internal Revenue Service's arsenal for a while. Now, thanks to more money from the Inflation Reduction Act, the tax agency is going to use more AI to expand its examinations of high-dollar earners. That includes not only individuals, but also partnerships and corporations. This shift of compliance efforts will shift the IRS' focus from working-class to wealthy taxpayers, noted IRS Commissioner Danny... Read more →
New IRS digital tax plans aim to get both taxpayers and tax agency employees out from under such paper piles. It's not your grandparents' Internal Revenue Service anymore. The Treasury Department today announced that a new IRS paperless processing initiative will be available to taxpayers by the 2024 tax filing season. The following year, the IRS will more fully digitize its side of the tax paperwork equation. The multiyear moves, according to the Treasury press release, will eliminate up to 200 million pieces of paper annually, cut processing times in half, and expedite refunds by several weeks. The IRS receives... Read more →
Flags of member nations at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland. (Photo by Photo by Peda Run on Unsplash) Here in the United States, the Internal Revenue Service has gotten a lot of attention for its efforts to fight tax evasion. Earlier this month, the IRS reported that it IRS had collected $38 million from more than 175 high-income tax delinquents. That money was the result of a new initiative made possible from $80 billion new Inflation Reduction Act funds, although Republicans clawed back $1.4 billion of that money (and more to come in future years) in the debt... Read more →
The U.S. Supreme Court yesterday struck down college admission affirmative action policies. Some legal experts say the high court's decision could also lead to more, and similar, challenges in how corporations make hiring and promotion decisions. That got me thinking, of course, about taxes. IRS audit unfairness: Most people who are audited by the Internal Revenue Service think they are being unfairly targeted. It seems that might actually be true in some cases. IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel recently acknowledged that the way the tax agency applies the federal tax laws is discriminatory. In a letter to the chair of the... Read more →
Many businesses that stayed open during the height of the coronavirus pandemic were able to do so thanks to the Employee Retention Credit (ERC). Some companies, however, subsequently filed for the 2020-2021 tax benefit at the urging of unscrupulous ERC promoters, and now are finding the IRS is looking into their claims. The Internal Revenue Service earlier this summer warned businesses about Employee Retention Credit (ERC) promotions that could land the companies in tax trouble. The ERC was created in 2020 as part of the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act to help businesses and their... Read more →
We got word today that a person connected to the White House and who didn't pay all his due taxes is pleading guilty to tax evasion. No. It's not that person. It's Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden. The younger Biden has agreed to plead guilty to two charges of misdemeanor tax evasion and enter a pretrial diversion agreement on a firearm possession charge, according to a Justice Department court filing today in Delaware. The two tax charges carry a maximum of one year in prison as well as a $25,000 fine. The arrangement reportedly also includes repayment of... Read more →
Communities across the United States this long weekend celebrated the newest federal holiday, Juneteenth. The name comes from combining June and nineteenth, the day in 1865 when official word arrived in Galveston, Texas, that President Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation 2½ years earlier. Yeah, late. Very late on the part of early Texans in recognizing that owning people not only was abhorrent and reprehensible, but finally and officially illegal. And three years into formal federal recognition of Juneteenth as a holiday, the whole country continues to grapple with slavery and racial bias and their continuing effects. That includes... Read more →
The United States avoided defaulting on its debt, thanks to last-minute deal reached by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and grudgingly agreed to earlier this month by Congress. Park of the package was a $21.4 billion cut to money the Internal Revenue Service was supposed to use for tax enforcement. The agreement called for an immediate $1.4 billion reduction, plus the loss of $20 billion over the next two years, most of that coming from the nearly $80 billion in extra funding the IRS was given as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. Critics of the hit... Read more →
Automation often makes life easier, until it doesn't. Some very surprised California taxpayers learned that lesson this week. So did the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS' automated notice issuance system sent most California taxpayers letters saying that they had missed their filing deadline and owed the U.S. Treasury. The IRS was wrong. The agency's mistake understandably freaked out Golden State residents whom the IRS previously granted a new Oct. 16 due date. The extra time was allotted so the taxpayers could deal with problems caused by widespread natural disaster across the state earlier this year. The IRS issued a mea... Read more →
Spring is the traditional time to clean out all the junk you've accumulated. Our neighborhood has a community yard sale the first weekend in May. Some of what doesn't get sold ends up going to local charities. That's a good way to dispose of clothing and household goods that are in good condition and, if you itemize, claim a tax deduction. Follow donation rules: The state of the donated goods is just one of the conditions you must take into consideration, especially if you're planning to deduct their value as an itemized charitable gift. The other key donation deduction factor... Read more →
In February 2022, the Internal Revenue Service announced that it was suspending several automatic tax notices. The move was prompted in large part by the massive backlog of tax filings that piled up when the agency closed offices as a precaution early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, taxpayers can expect those mailings to resume, starting with 2022 balance due notices. Current CP14s going out first: IRS Deputy Commissioner for Collection and Operations Support Darren Guillot, who was part of an American Bar Association tax conference panel in Washington, D.C., last week, said that approximately 5-to-8 million CP14 Notices, should start... Read more →
Photo by Sharon Waldron on Unsplash Every year after Tax Day, I get emails from my financial institutions and local office supply stores about upcoming shredding days. On these dates, I and all my neighbors and fellow customers can bring our documents we would like turned into confetti to prevent identity thieves from using any of the information. That's a welcome service. But there are some documents, especially tax-related ones, that you need to hang onto for a while. Here's an overview of the tax material you need to keep and for how long. Your 1040: The main record everyone... Read more →
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service today released an extensive plan on how the tax agency will spend the nearly $80 billion in added funds it received in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRAct). New IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, in the introduction to the 150-page Strategic Operating Plan, said the plan is structured to achieve the following five objectives — Dramatically improve services to help taxpayers meet their obligations and receive the tax incentives for which they are eligible. Quickly resolve taxpayer issues when they arise. Focus expanded enforcement on taxpayers with complex tax filings and high-dollar noncompliance to address... Read more →
Click image to read full indictment. April 4, 2023, is one of those "where were you when…" days. Many of us were in front of our televisions or computer screens watching the formal criminal arraignment of a former U.S. president. Donald J. Trump pleaded not guilty today to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records. "True and accurate business records are important everywhere, to be sure. They are all the more important in Manhattan, the financial center of the world," said Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg at an afternoon press conference in which he discussed why his office brought the... Read more →
UPDATE, March 12, 2023: Congratulations to all those who won Academy Awards tonight, especially the big winner, "Everything Everywhere All at Once." The movie, known on social media as #EEAAO (or #EEAO if you don't want to include the preposition) proved that this year's major Hollywood event definitely wasn't your grandparents' Oscars. The wildly imaginative film, which featured a tax audit, won best picture. Three EEAO stars, Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, and Jamie Lee Curtis, won acting Academy Awards. And original screenplay and directing Oscars went to The Daniels, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Jamie Lee Curtis, far left,... Read more →