Washington D.C. Tax Law Blog

One by one, the giants of Swiss banking have fallen. They have been forced to submit to the long-running American enforcement crackdown on offshore accounts. That crackdown is not only long-running; the standards for compliance have been stepped up since Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) in 2010. The first Swiss giant […]

For those who are in business for themselves as sole proprietors, managing tax compliance is an important task. Not only is there income tax and the obligation to report profits, but also self-employment tax, quarterly estimated tax reporting, social security and Medicare taxes and tax withholdings, federal unemployment tax, and other potential tax obligations as […]

Data privacy is a critical concern in the online. Breaches of personal information can lead to identity theft, fraud and other serious problems for those who information is compromised. In recent years, there have been numerous widespread significant data breaches in the private sector, at companies such as Target and EBay. Breaches have occurred in […]

Running a business can have stressful aspects under any circumstances. Certain things though can add to the stress a business owner experiences. One is finding out from the Internal Revenue Service that their business is going to be audited. Business audits by the Internal Revenue Service can be looking at all different kinds of things […]

Tax filing is a little bit like homework, in that it involves turning in information that meets certain requirements. To be sure, the IRS does not exactly give you a letter grade on what you turn in (or fail to turn in). But an audit, or even worse a criminal investigation, can carry consequences more […]

Let’s continue our discussion of how the sheer complexity of the tax code makes it difficult to stay in full compliance. As we noted in the first part of the post, it’s all too easy to make an innocent error or to be unaware of some specific requirement. This is where the concept of “willfulness” […]

A few weeks ago the world was introduced to one of the largest information leaks ever seen: over 11.5 million documents and 2.6 terabytes of information from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca went public. While the leak does not necessarily stamp all those involved with guilty convictions for tax evasion, money laundering, or any […]

Tax avoidance is a perfectly honorable American tradition. You have every right as a taxpayer to take advantage of deductions, credits and other preferences to minimize or avoid taxes – as long as you stay within the law. But staying within the letter of the law can be difficult when the tax code is so […]

Let’s continue our discussion of the disparity between the cumulative amount of tax that the IRS says taxpayers owe as a whole and the amount that the agency collects in practice. This difference or disparity is called the “tax gap.” In the first part of this two-part post, we noted that underreporting of income is […]

“Tax gap” is kind of a wonky term. But it reflects a tax compliance and enforcement context that has definite implications for taxpayers. The term refers to the difference between the amount of taxes that a revenue agency actually collects and the amount of taxes that theoretically were due. In this two-part post, we will […]