Tax Lawyer's Blog

Michelle Malkin reports that the transparency President has done another one of his patented Friday afternoon document dumps,¹ this time with the voluminous and highly complex IRS rules for implementing the tax provisions of Obamacare: (footnote is mine). If it’s Friday, it’s another White House dump day. Cue the dump truck horn: Doot! Doot! Doot! While Obama [...]

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The economy added 200,000 jobs in December and President Obama is taking credit for it. The only problem is what he’s taking credit for happens to be tax cuts. Here’s an excerpt of Obama’s speech from the White House website (emphasis added): This morning we learned that American businesses added another 212,000 jobs last month … . And [...]

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The AP reports that the IRS has continued to allocate more of its resources to the examination of the tax returns of the super rich: One in eight people earning at least $1 million annually was audited by the Internal Revenue Service last year, making them far likelier to be examined than those making below $200,000, [...]

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From Paul Caron: Year in Review: The 2011 Person of the Year, 134 Tax Notes 7 (Jan. 3, 2012): The dire state of tax politics became woefully evident in 2011,  as fragile optimism about the possibility of tax reform bumped into the  harsh reality of political intransigence. Democrats and Republicans each  complained about the other’s [...]

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The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration says the IRS needs to improve the quality of its audits of small corporations. Listen: TIGTA reviewed whether IRS examiners followed proper procedures and guidelines when auditing the returns of small corporations. The IRS defines small corporations as corporations with assets of less than $10 million. Many corporations in the [...]

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Taxpayers and their advisors have good reason to want to categorize losses as theft losses rather than investment losses. Theft losses are treated as ordinary losses and are deductible in the year incurred.¹ Investment losses are treated as capital losses and are limited to the amount of capital gains plus $3,000. It is, therefore, not surprising that TIGTA has [...]

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Accounting Today reports that one of Switzerland’s oldest banks, Clariden Leu, has become the latest to cooperate with U.S. tax authorities in disclosing the names of American investors: The bank has begun notifying some of its U.S. customers that it plans to reveal their names and account information to the Internal Revenue Service, according to [...]

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