Let me be the first to nominate National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson to be the next Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
It has been a near Sisyphian struggle, but Ms. Olson has somehow managed to keep the boulder of taxpayer rights at the top of the hill.
WebCPA reports that Ms. Olson has urged the IRS to do the following:
Answer more than [...]
Tags: Announcements · IRS Liens and Levies · IRS procedure · Tax Collections
WebCPA reports that Joe Francis of “Girls Gone Wild” fame has filed a lawsuit against the IRS for illegal collection activities (emphasis added):
[S]hortly after the judge accepted his plea deal, the IRS filed a lien for $33,819,087.14 for three years of back taxes, from 2001 to 2003 (see IRS Files $34M Lien Against ‘Girls Gone Wild’ [...]
Tags: Court Cases · IRS Liens and Levies · IRS appeals · News · Tax Collections
From the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up department Mark Segraves of WTOP.com reports:
At a time when the White House is projecting the largest deficit in the nation’s history, Uncle Sam is trying to recover billions of dollars in unpaid taxes from its own employees.
Federal workers owe more than $3 billion in income taxes they failed to pay in 2008. [...]
Tags: News · Tax Collections
David Ellis of CNN.Money reports that the FDIC has published a study that says,
[A]pproximately 7.7% of all U.S. households, or 17 million Americans, were considered “unbanked,” meaning they did not have any sort of a checking or savings account.
The study says that the main reason people do not have bank accounts is because of a [...]
Tags: IRS Liens and Levies · News · Tax Collections
In my previous blog post I wrote about the IRS’s issuance of proposed regulations on the new credit card transaction 1099 reporting requirement.
I am dubious of the usefulness of the new reporting requirements because I don’t think they will achieve the IRS’s stated goal of finding unreported income.
Historically corporations have been exempt from the 1099 reporting requirements. The primary [...]
Tags: Opinion · Tax Collections
Tax News reports that the IRS has issued proposed regulations for the new reporting requirement for credit card transactions:
The provision was enacted as part of the Housing Assistance Tax Act of 2008 and is designed to improve voluntary tax compliance by business taxpayers and help the IRS determine whether their tax returns are correct and complete.
The regulations, which were issued on [...]
Tags: Announcements · Tax Collections
Henry K. Lee of the San Francisco Chronicle tells us about another tax and spend Democrat who apparently doesn’t think the tax part applies to him:
Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums and his wife failed to pay more than $239,000 in taxes over a three-year period and have had a lien slapped on their property by the Internal Revenue [...]
Tags: IRS Liens and Levies · Tax Collections · Tax Crimes
Kay Bell of Don’t Mess With Taxes writes about the IRS’s intensified program to find and prosecute rich tax evaders in Get Ready for Increased Audits:
“The [amnesty] initiative is part of a much broader effort to crack down on offshore tax evasion,” [IRS Commissioner Doug] Shulman said. He noted that the IRS also plans to “scour” [...]
Tags: Tax Collections · Tax Crimes
The AP reports that the IRS’s enhanced whistleblower program has resulted in a 1,000% increase in tips since it’s implementation in 2006 the IRS said yesterday:
Dangle some cash and a lot of people are happy to turn in their employers for cheating on their taxes.
Since Congress beefed up whistleblower rewards in late 2006, tips about suspected [...]
Tags: Tax Collections · Tax Crimes
CPA blogger Bill Murray of April 15.com alerts us to a Wall Street Journal article in which the author, Laura Sanders, reports that
[S]tate Tax Collection Agents in Minnesota, Nebraska and even here in California have used Social Media sites such as My Space and Facebook to obtain information that have helped them to collect thousands of [...]
Tags: Tax Collections
Wall Street Journal – Taxes Blog
