The latest straight from the IRS — new rules, deadlines, guidance, and announcements explained in plain English.
The Internal Revenue Service has reached the one million mark. In a statement released today, the IRS announced that it has processed over one million tax electronic payments to date through IRS Direct Pay. Those payments have totaled over $1.7 billion. Direct Pay is available to individuals to pay tax bills or estimated tax payments…
700,000. That’s the number of potential plaintiffs in a class action suit filed today in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. The suit, Adam Steele, Brittany Montrois et al versus United States of America (complaint opens in Scribd), challenges the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) attempts to regulate tax preparers. The two…
Tax refund fraud costs taxpayers billions of dollars each year. In an effort to curb fraud, the Internal Revenue Service has made a number of changes over the past few years, including new controls over Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers (ITINs) which took effect in 2013. Those rules, however, are changing again. ITINs are numbers assigned…
So do they or don’t they? After maintaining for quite some time that Lois Lerner’s emails are completely, definitely gone (maybe), it turns out that there’s now a different story. According to Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton: Department of Justice attorneys for the Internal Revenue Service told Judicial Watch on Friday that Lois Lerner’s emails,…
If you felt like your wallet was a few dollars lighter this year, you’re likely right. New tax changes which went into effect for the tax year 2013 finally hit taxpayers in 2014: to date, receipts as reported by the Treasury are up for every single month as compared to 2013. So far, the government…
Five million dollars. That’s how much money the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) estimates that victims have lost to the most recent IRS phone scam. TIGTA has received 90,000 complaints about the scam through its telephone hotline. In March, J. Russell George, the Inspector General called it “the largest scam of its kind…
While taxpayers were popping returns into the mail this year, scammers were busy trying to figure out how to cash in. The Internal Revenue Service reported that, by Tax Day, they were investigating 1,800 active cases of identity theft investigations. Many of those cases involved millions of dollars each: just recently, a New York woman…
It’s that time of year: the National Taxpayer Advocate, Nina Olson, has submitted her mid-year report to the House Committee on Ways and Means and the Senate Committee on Finance. The Taxpayer Advocate is required by statute to submit two reports each year. Those reports are submitted directly to Congress without any prior review or…
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Except, this time, there’s a twist. Just a few weeks after Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen announced the launch of the Annual Filing Season program (AFS), a voluntary program to regulate tax return preparers, a challenge has been filed in the U.S. District Court to stop…
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax-exempt scandal has resulted in a number of casualties but perhaps none more than small tax-exempt organizations who have found themselves trapped in the black hole that is the application process. It used to be that clean applications would wait approximately 30 days for approval. Occasionally, waits could get bumped…