Mystic Pizza Owner Gets Prison Sentence for Tax Evasion (From Accounting Today) The owner of Mystic Pizza, the Connecticut pizzeria made famous by the 1988 Julia Roberts movie of the same name, has been sentenced to over a year in prison on charges of tax evasion and structuring cash transactions. John Zelepos, 49, of North […]

IRS Warns of Latest Tax Scams (From Accounting Today) The Internal Revenue Service is cautioning taxpayers and tax practitioners against the newest scams as losses top $20 million in money stolen from victims by fraudsters claiming to work for the IRS and other government agencies, including the Department of Motor Vehicles. The IRS said Thursday […]

IRS Adopts Taxpayer Bill of Rights (From Accounting Today) The Internal Revenue Service has adopted a “Taxpayer Bill of Rights” that it said would become a cornerstone document to provide the nation’s taxpayers with a better understanding of their rights. The Taxpayer Bill of Rights takes multiple existing rights that have already been included in […]

IRS to Step up Penalties for Delinquent Payroll Taxes (Accounting Today) Employers owed the Internal Revenue Service approximately $14.1 billion in delinquent Social Security, Medicare and individual federal income taxes that they had withheld from employee paychecks as of June 30, 2012, and the Internal Revenue Service is being urged to do more to assess […]

Tax Preparer Fraud Cases (From Accounting Today) New York: Preparer Celamour Berus, of the Springfield Gardens section of the Borough of Queens, has been arrested for multiple tax crimes following his indictment on April 3. According to the indictment, Berus, owner and operator of the tax prep business Celamour Enterprises, prepared false individual income tax […]

IRS Streamlines Innocent Spouse Relief (From Accounting Today) The Internal Revenue Service has issued new guidance and streamlined procedures for spouses who are seeking equitable relief from joint income tax liability. Revenue Procedure 2013-34 supersedes the earlier Revenue Procedure 2003-61. It provides the threshold requirements for any request for equitable relief and sets forth conditions […]

The Internal Revenue Service needs to strengthen its correspondence audit selection process by auditing more of the prior- and subsequent-year tax returns of noncompliant income tax filers, according to a new government report. The report, by the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, noted that the IRS relies heavily on the correspondence audit process to […]

From Accounting Today: IRS Suspends Tax Refunds and Tax Court Closes during Government Shutdown  The Internal Revenue Service has temporarily stopped sending out tax refunds, and the Tax Court has suspended operations during the federal government shutdown, as lawmakers in Congress continue their battle over delaying or defunding “Obamacare” for a year. The IRS announced […]

As reported in Accounting Today: IRS Employees Disciplined for Bypassing Taxpayers’ Representatives Between October 2011 and September 2012, the Internal Revenue Service investigated 13 complaints of IRS personnel who directly contacted taxpayers instead of going through their designated representatives, but IRS managers disciplined or counseled only two of the employees because of their actions. The […]

The IRS can abate penalties for “reasonable cause.” That does not mean the IRS will abate penalties because a taxpayer did not have the money to pay the tax. The IRS takes the position that it should be paid first after the necessities (as the IRS views them) of life. However, events or conditions like […]