(This post is part of my Small Business Startup & Survival Guide. You can catch up on the whole series here.) When we opened our own business, my husband and I thought that we were going to call all of the shots. We had a name, a business plan, an office space and had even designed…
(This post is part of my Small Business Startup & Survival Guide. You can catch up on the whole series here.) When you’re getting started in business, it can be tempting to rush through to get to the good stuff. After all, you have your cool idea and your even cooler sounding name… Can’t you just tack…
In 1938, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began working part-time in a Palo Alto garage. With $538 just in working capital, the pair developed an audio oscillator: it would become the first product for the fledgling Hewlett-Packard partnership. Today, Hewlett-Packard sits at #35 on Forbes’ list of most valuable brands, with an estimated worth of…
This story appears in Forbes Entrepreneurs September 7, 2015 Volume 196, Issue 3, Page 62 Since opening her own practice in Cookeville, Tenn. in 2003, estate lawyer Joy Buck Gothard has hired four employees. She considers them family, she says, and has encouraged each to get health insurance by paying a subsidy straight from her…
The Internal Revenue Service has issued a statement regarding additional reports of unauthorized access of taxpayer information using the “Get Transcript” application. Follows is the statement in full: Following an incident involving the IRS’s “Get Transcript” web application discovered in May, the IRS conducted an extensive review covering the 2015 filing season to assess whether…
Earlier this year, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) announced that identity thieves illegally accessed tax information tied to approximately 114,000 taxpayers with unsuccessful attempts made on about 111,000 additional taxpayer accounts. IRS Commissioner John Koskinen delivered the news at a hastily arranged press conference on May 26, 2015, to alert taxpayers to the breach. At…
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump prides himself on speaking his mind. And what he has on his mind is getting rid of Kansas City-based tax preparation company H&R Block. When asked on “Fox & Friends” about tax policy, Trump offered up a few words, “Put H&R Block out of business.” Trump was referring to efforts…
There’s no question that identity theft is a problem in the United States. A 2015 study released by Javelin Strategy & Research found that there were 12.7 million victims of identity theft in the U.S. 2014. That works out to a new identity fraud victim every two seconds. Identity theft has topped the list of…
It’s Fix The Tax Code Friday! One of the points that was stressed repeatedly in the presidential debates is the complexity of the Tax Code. Almost all candidates agree that some kind of tax reform is needed but there are differing views of what that reform should look like (you can see a brief overview…
With two more months left to go in the fiscal year, the feds are on a roll. Tax revenues for the first ten months of the fiscal year topped a record $2,672,414,000,000 (report downloads as a pdf). Those numbers represent almost 8% in growth of tax revenues over those collected in 2014. In pure dollars,…