Washington D.C. Tax Law Blog

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 […]

The so-called Panama Papers are voluminous files of information from a law firm in Panama that engaged in helping foreign clients avoid or evade taxes with dubious or even illegal shelters. Their publication last spring had immediate and wide-ranging effects around the world, including a new U.S. role on verification of the identities of offshore […]

A few weeks ago, we concluded a two-part post on collection due process rights. At that time, we promised you an update on the upcoming IRS program to use private debt collectors to go after tax debt under certain circumstances. In this post, we will deliver that update, in the form of a Q & […]

In the first part of this post, we began discussing some important things to know about taxes when you’re opening a small business. We touched on factors involved in entity selection and the fact that employers face often tough choices on how to classify workers for tax purposes. In this part of the post, let’s […]

As someone who would like to open a small business, you have probably gotten used to politicians’ praising your job-creating virtues and promising to lighten your regulatory load. Such statements are not always very substantive or specific. But they serve as an indirect reminder that smart handling of tax issues can play a key role […]

In the first part of this post, we began discussing collection due process (CDP) rights. Those rights and required procedures are important in establishing the rules that the IRS has to play by when seeking to collect back taxes. In this part of the post, let’s look at some of the reasons why people can […]