Blog

October 1, 2012

If you have paid any attention to the upcoming Presidential election, which is hard to do even if try your best to avoid it, you know that both parties have setup the tax code as a wedge issue. Regardless of whose vision ultimately wins out, there are already a large number of scheduled changes to the tax code if Congress does not override current law.

State Installment Plans and the IRS

August 31, 2012

I subscribe to a few Linkedin tax professional groups and this week another attorney posted his new blog to the group page. His article states that as part of the new offer in compromise program, the IRS will accept payments to state and local taxing authorities for past tax liabilities as an allowable expense.

Statute of Limitations Basics

August 17, 2012

Without a doubt, there are more misconceptions about the statute of limitations concerning tax matters than any other area of law that I practice. It comes up in consultations, over the phone, at a party, etc. and the conversation usually starts out with the line, “A buddy told me…is that true?”

August 3, 2012

Ok. I admit it. I am not patient enough to wait for Olympic results in primetime. I had to peek. For some reason, I went to Yahoo Sports to check the medal count instead of ESPN. One of the lead articles immediately caught my attention. The headline – Winning a gold medal brings a $9,000 tax bill. My initial reaction was “wow, that’s a lot.” My second reaction was “hold on a second, that can’t be right.”

June 28, 2012

I originally posted this in November 2010. Considering the Supreme Court upheld the ACA today, I believe a re-post is appropriate. As I hope to explain in this post, the new healthcare law does not directly impose a tax on sales of residential real estate, but instead imposes a tax on certain investment income, which in real estate parlance is the capital gain, if any, from the sale of real property. For the purposes of this post, we will focus on a taxpayer’s principal residence.Laying the Groundwork

June 14, 2012

The following IRS news release was originally released on Dec. 16, 2008. Given the most recent report that home foreclosures went up for the first time in 27 months (read here), I thought I would pull this news release from the IRS archives as it is as relevant today as it was three and a half years ago.

June 1, 2012

The following article is verbatim copy of IRS news release IR-2012-53, released on May 21, 2012: “IR-2012-53, May 21, 2012 WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today announced another expansion of its “Fresh Start” initiative by offering more flexible terms to its Offer in Compromise (OIC) program that will enable some of the most financially distressed taxpayers to clear up their tax problems and in many cases more quickly than in the past.

IRS Priorities

May 18, 2012

Are you dying to know what the IRS considers its highest priorities? … Probably not, but on April 5, 2012, IRS Commissioner Douglas H. Shulman outlined the Service’s list of priorities in a prepared speech before the National Press Club.

1099-K

May 4, 2012

Over the past year, I have fielded a number of questions on the 1099-K, Merchant Card and Third-Party Payments, introduced in 2011. This reporting form requires companies that handle merchant card transactions or third-party settlement transactions to report gross receipts of certain payees. A payee is essentially someone who accepts credit/debit cards through a merchant account (swipes cards at point of sale, inputs card information online, etc.) or accepts payment through a third party settlement company (think Paypal).

IRS Video on Fresh Start Initiative

April 13, 2012

I facetiously believe that come tax time, everyone becomes a tax expert…or at least knows a tax expert. I receive a number of phone calls this time of the year from taxpayers who simply do not know how to pay their tax liability. In an alarming number of cases, the taxpayer and his/her spouse are regular wage earners who simply did not withhold enough. Many of them tell me that they were told by their co-worker “tax expert” that overtime is exempt from withholding.

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