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Most Recent Posts

Make The IRS Great Again

Make The IRS Great Again

Regardless, there are some people who instead of honing selling and political skills become great accountants. Some of them are very compliance oriented. They get frustrated by things not being right, because things should be done right, because right is right even though the client doesn’t want to pay for it and the IRS will never figure it out.

That’s who the IRS should be hiring. In many areas of tax practice the best and the brightest work for the IRS for a few years, then go into public accounting or the law firms for much bigger money. The IRS should turn the tables and grab up the compliance-oriented people who know where the bodies are likely buried. IRS could offer good benefits, a better work life balance and a great deal of perverse satisfaction.

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If The IRS Plays Politics With Tax-Exempts, President Trump Is Holding A Smoking Tweet

But there’s a nontechnical problem, too, which is in many ways worse. President Trump seems to want to emulate the worst aspects of President Nixon. Nixon tried to use the IRS to attack his enemies. And Trump wants to use the IRS to attack people and organizations with which he disagrees. Fortunately, there are protections in place making it hard for him to use the IRS this way. But he’s proven particularly effective at ignoring and subverting norms; this is one that I hope he doesn’t manage to subvert

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What Mary L Trump Needed Was Forensic Accounting

In 2017, Mary was approached by the New York Times. She told them that she did not have any documentation, but they suggested that the attorney might. As it turned out there was a trove of documents, which she turned over to the Times.

According to her account, those documents would prove that her grandfather’s estate was worth a billion dollars.

Taking this at face value, the question is why were there not forensic accountants and independent appraisers going through those boxes before settlement? No offense to the Times, but they probably would have figured it out a lot quicker than a team of investigative reporters.

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TIGTA – IRS Scores 98% On First Stimulus Payments

And then there are 40,656 individuals who already have their second stimulus payment, even though they were only supposed to get one. It appears that that was a sort of divorce bonus. People appeared as the secondary name on 2018 joint returns and then they filed their own return in 2019.

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Newly-Released IRS Data Book Shows Continued Downsizing of IRS and Taxpayer Audits

While hindsight is certainly 20/20, it has become harder to doubt that a short-staffed IRS has made handling the economic effects of this year’s pandemic all the more challenging. The U.S. government should perhaps consider an increased mobilization of staff to handle the complexities that will arise due to the various rule changes and concessions triggered by this year’s unprecedented events.

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IRS Victory In Easement Case Prompts An Offer To Not Be Refused

The decision that I think likely triggered this notice, which I suspect was prepared some time before, was Plateau Holdings LLC (TC Memo 2020-93). As with many of the decisions Judge Lauber approved of the IRS disallowing on a technical error involving the terms of the easement. But in order to assess the penalty valuation has to be considered and that gets to the heart of the matter.

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Why Stimulus For The Dead Might Not Have Been So Bad

Why Stimulus For The Dead Might Not Have Been So Bad

Overall I think the IRS did a pretty good job particularly given that they went into this “war” with Vietnam War era software as you can see in this article by Tom Temin in Federal News Network earlier this year. Not to mention a huge headcount reduction in the aftermath of the interminable “scandal”.

GAO seems to be concerned about them chasing the erroneous stimulus payments, but given that many of them went to widows and orphans, I think that should be a low priority.

Bottom line is that when Congress wanted money shoveled out quickly IRS thought fast and made mistakes which in retrospect was absolutely the right thing to do.

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