Gay/Lesbian Married Couples may get same Estate Tax Treatment as Heterosexual CouplesEdith Schlain Windsor v. U.S. (DC NY 6/6/2012) A Federal District Court in New York ruled in favor of a surviving same-sex spouse's constitutional challenge to section 3 of the Defense of Marriage...
Form 8938 - Foreign Financial Asset ReportingThe IRS has released new information about assets that must be reported on Form 8938, Statement of Specified Foreign Financial Assets, This form is part of the Obama Administration' attack on taxpayers with undisclosed...
Consulting Fees Paid to C Corporation Shareholders Were Disguised DividendsThe 7th Cir. affirmed Tax Court disallowance of a C corporation deduction of consulting fees paid to corporations entities owned by its shareholders. The Court agreed with the IRS that the fees were disguised dividends.The Tax...
Criminals Mine Data from Social Media Sites to Prey on GrandparentsHave you heard of this recent scam? Criminals scour publicly available data on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. Then, they locate a vulnerable relative -- generally a grandparent -- and call them pretending...
US Tax Court the ports collection agency tactic of filing IRS form 1099-C for cancellation of indebtedness income. One technique used by many collection agencies is to threaten a debtor that if they do not make a payment the debt will be reported as "canceled"....
Loans to Inject Capital into a C CorpWhen you borrow to inject capital into your own C corporation (or buy shares in a closely held C corp), the related interest expense falls into the investment interest category, regardless how active you are in the business....
Employment laws usually favor employees. This is especially true in dealing with overtime. Employees are presumably "non-exempt" and get overtime pay for working more than 40 hours in a single work week. The pay rate for overtime work must be at least 1.5 times the...
Navigating the IRS bureaucracy can be challenging for many taxpayers. The agency processes more than 141 million individual income tax returns annually and deals with a constantly changing Internal Revenue Code. There were approximately 4,430 changes to the tax code from 2001 through 2010 -- an average...
The IRS has a 3 year statute of limitations to conduct an audit. This can be extended to 6 years for the under-reporting more than 25% of gross income. In an attempt to extend the statute of limitations, a taxpayer that correctly reported gross income,...
The IRS keeps hiring "Revenue Agents" (the IRS term for Auditor). In the last few years, there has been a massive increase of auditors for Large Businesses (the is is called the LB&I - Large Business and International group). Now the IRS is going after...