Many tax proposals are in play as President-elect Donald Trump and his administration prepare to take office. One of those proposals is not about specific tax provisions, but about the structure of the agency itself. The proposal is to split off the criminal enforcement division from the IRS and place it elsewhere within the Treasury […]

Christmas is still a couple of weeks away, with plenty of presents not yet purchased, much less placed under the tree or chimney with care. But if Christmas is coming, it also means a new year and a new tax-filing season are approaching fast. This week, the IRS announced details about the opening of the […]

A repeal of the federal estate tax may or may not happen when the Trump administration takes office. A lot will depend on the dynamics of the new, Republican-controlled Congress. In the meantime, however, new proposed rules from the Treasury Department and the IRS on the taxation of interests in family-owned businesses are generating significant […]

In the first part of this post, we discussed several negative effects that can result from a tax lien. These include keeping you from selling or refinancing your house and hurting your credit rating. Because credit checks by prospective employers are increasingly common, a tax lien can even make it more difficult to get a […]

If you have tax debt, the IRS may use a tax lien as a key tool in its collection process. A lien does not actually take your property; a levy, not a lien, does that. But a tax lien can still have many negative effects. In part one of this two-part post, we will discuss […]

A tax audit is hardly a deal breaker for moving forward with life. After all, an audit doesn’t necessarily mean you owe more tax or did anything wrong. And of course a celebrity businessman who has famously been under near-constant audit for the last two decades has just been elected president of the United States. […]

Let’s resume our discussion of tax penalties and the possibilities for getting relief from them. In part one, we focused on first-time abatement (FTA) of penalties. FTA is a program for taxpayers with a strong previous record of complying with tax laws. In this part of the post, let’s use a Q & A format […]

The IRS is much more apt to use sticks than carrots to encourage tax compliance. And one of the most frequently used sticks is to hit you with tax penalties. Fortunately, you don’t have to just roll over and accept the hit. Taxpayers have every right to contest tax penalties – and often succeed in […]

It’s been 85 years since the IRS took down Al Capone. Other law enforcement agencies had sought to prosecute the famed gangster for murder, extortion and host of other crimes. But it was the IRS that put him in prison, on a charge of tax evasion. After so long, the Capone case might seem as […]

Let’s continue our discussion of the consequences of the disclosure last spring of a massive series of documents on foreign tax shelters known as the Panama Papers. The documents cast a harsh light on tax avoidance or evasion strategies used by the very rich. In part one of this post, we noted that the European […]