Tax Lawyer's Blog

Lauren Sanders and Arden Dale of the Wall Street Journal report that the IRS has been accused by a group of criminal tax lawyers of doing a bait and switch on taxpayers who voluntarily disclosed their offshore tax accounts:
An influential group of criminal tax lawyers is sharply criticizing the Internal Revenue Service for its decision [...]

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Ryan J. Donmoyer of Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports in Americans Seeking Reward Money Inform IRS on Others that:
Americans seeking reward money are turning in neighbors, clients and employers they suspect of cheating on taxes to the IRS at a rate of nearly eight per day, the director of the agency’s whistleblower program said.
Steve Whitlock, the director, told [...]

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Jack Townsend of Federal Tax Crimes blog posted about the recently released IRS FAQs on the voluntary disclosure program for taxpayers with offshore accounts.
Jack makes several important observations including:
Voluntary Disclosure requires a “noisy” disclosure. Simply sending in amended or delinquent returns or forms (“quiet disclosures”) does not qualify for the program.
 . . . those who have made [...]

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Reuters reported yesterday that President Obama wants to quadruple the IRS enforcement budget:
President Barack Obama proposed on Thursday nearly doubling funds to enforce U.S. tax laws next year, with an aim of more than quadrupling funding for tax compliance to $2.1 billion within five years.
The budget plan seeks $12.1 billion for the Internal Revenue Service, responsible [...]

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Many people, including some lawyers and tax professionals, erroneously believe that federal income taxes can never be discharged in a Bankruptcy proceeding.
Generally, tax debts that have been outstanding more than 3 years from the due date of the tax returns giving rise to them and that have been outstanding more than 240 days from the [...]

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In these bad economic times few of us have any extra cash laying around after we pay our monthly living expenses.
The IRS doesn’t care about that, right?
Wrong.
If you can’t pay your debt and can prove it, the IRS will stop (at least temporarily) attempting to collect the debt from you.
Non-Collectible Status
The IRS does not want [...]

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Tom Herman of the Wall Street Journal writes an interesting article titled How To Confess to Being a Tax Cheat and tells guilty-minded taxpayers what to do if they have a tax problem and are not an Obama Cabinet appointee.
First, he says, if you know you made a mistake on your tax return you may file an amended [...]

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In previous blog posts titled Tax Gap Widens Expect IRS to Get Tougher on Non-Compliers and IRS Continues to Step Up Enforcement Efforts, 2007 Statistics Reveal we wrote about the Obama administration’s plan to close the tax gap.
Here is what Mike Godfrey of Tax News.Com wrote about the IRS’s plan to close the international portion of the tax [...]

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For over 20 years we have represented hundreds of clients who have lived for a very long time in abject fear of the IRS.
Most of these clients, after we got them back in good standing with the IRS and on an installment plan to pay their back taxes, have told us that they felt like the weight of the [...]

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Once an assessment is made against you, your case gets sent to the IRS Collection Division.
There are two types of collection agents taxpayers encounter in the IRS collection process:

Automated Collection Distributors; and
Local Revenue Agents.

The Automated Collection System
The Automated Collection System was developed in the early 1980’s to allow the IRS to contact taxpayers by telephone [...]

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