Tax Controversies

The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) appears to be making headway in its attempts to bring down Caterpillar. The industrial equipment supplier is facing allegations of tax fraud. Essentially, the IRS believes the Peoria, Illinois based company has attempted to avoid its tax obligations by putting profits for sales into a subsidiary based in Switzerland. A […]

The Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts (FBAR) might not be on your radar, but maybe it should be. FBARs, technically FinCEN Form 114, are used to disclose foreign accounts valued at $10,000 or more at any point in a year. While the international account disclosure requirement has been around for 45 years since […]

International tax compliance has become so complicated it sometimes seems like a constant crossword puzzle of acronyms and obligations. If you live abroad, have foreign accounts, or meet other criteria, the intricacies of FATCA, FBAR, FinCen, Form 8938 are in play, carrying the potential to trip you up. In this post, we will use a […]

Late last month Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced what he said was one of the largest sanctions actions every taken by Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). The sanctions are aimed at 271 employees of the agency of the Syrian government believed to have been involved in chemical weapons attacks. These individuals are now […]

In the first part of this post, we noted what a hassle it can be to take care of taxes as a freelance worker. Figuring out self-employment tax can be complicated – and it’s easy to fall behind on making the estimated tax payments you’re supposed to make quarterly. If you have a home office, […]

Technically, it isn’t even called the FBAR anymore. The form for filing a report of foreign bank accounts that meet certain dollar thresholds is now called FinCEN 114, though the term FBAR is still commonly used. The name change for the form is only one of many changes relating offshore account compliance that has changed […]

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 […]

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 […]