The hits keep coming. Just one day after Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner John Koskinen warned employees that budget cuts would lead to delayed refunds, lags in correspondences and potential furloughs, Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson released her 2014 annual report to Congress. Olson’s report didn’t offer any relief for taxpayers, instead expressing concern that “taxpayers…
With a week to go before tax season opens, taxpayers were already bracing for a potentially “miserable” filing season. It turns out that it could live up to the hype. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Commissioner Koskinen has advised employees that the budget cuts will result in reduced services to taxpayers. In an email to employees…
Tax season opens in eight days. The Internal Revenue Service expects to process nearly 150 million individual tax returns by the time tax season wraps. Will you be filing one of those returns? And more important, do you need to? For the 2015 tax season, you’ll report the income that you received in 2014. That…
If you believe the headlines, sorting out the Affordable Care Act (commonly referred to as “Obamacare”) is going to be the single worst moment of your 2015 tax filing season. That might be true for some taxpayers. But most taxpayers – about 130 million or so – aren’t going to feel any pain at all….
It’s officially the busy season for tax professionals, which means that the volume of correspondence, including emails and letters, is about to increase. This go-round, however, those emails and letters should look a bit different from those sent out last year: they should be shorter. A lot shorter. The reason? Those email disclosures. The IRS…
Getting those tax records together for the 2015 filing season? Don’t forget about Bitcoin. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) issued guidance to taxpayers in 2014 on how to treat Bitcoin – and other virtual currency – for federal income tax purposes. That guidance, IRS Notice 2014-21, (downloads as a pdf) indicates that Bitcoin and other…
Remember that “13 Investigates: IRS tax loophole” video that went viral? This one? People went nuts about this supposed loophole that allowed tax credits for undocumented workers to use to beef up their refunds. I said, at the time: This is not a loophole. It’s tax fraud. Those are two totally different things. This week,…
Get Free Beats Headphones. That’s just one of the tactics that tax preparers are rolling out this season in an effort to woo your business. A poster in one window touted that the preparer would “Pay You $100 To File Your Taxes.” Other signs promise free food and beautiful girls. Desmond Hudson, an Enrolled Agent…
With filing season just around the corner, the tax software wars are heating up. Earlier this week, MousePrint (sister site to ConsumerWorld.org) issued a “Warning for TurboTax Users.” According to the site, “[r]egular purchasers of Intuit’s TurboTax Deluxe, the top selling desktop tax preparation software program, are in for a nasty surprise this year.” That…
Real Housewives of New Jersey star Teresa Giudice turned herself in to the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Connecticut, early this morning to begin serving a 15-month sentence for bankruptcy fraud. Teresa was sentenced to 15 months in prison by a federal judge for her role in the Giudices’ financial and tax fraud cases. Her…