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The AICPA Presses The IRS To Give a Bigger Break To Hurricane-Affected Taxpayers and Tax Preparers

The IRS has put a few measures in place to soften the blow from Hurricane Sandy but the ever digilent AICPA says that is not enough. And what about the tax preparers also affected by the storm?

The AICPA is on it:

The American Institute of CPAs has asked the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to consider broader relief from filing deadlines for individuals and businesses affected by Hurricane Sandy.

In a Nov. 1 letter to IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman, Jeffrey Porter, CPA, chair of the AICPA’s Tax Executive Committee, noted that the IRS expects to grant additional filing and payment relief as qualifying disaster declarations are issued by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), beyond the limited initial guidance issued yesterday. “This situation merits an extraordinary response from the IRS – FEMA declaration or not,“ Porter wrote. “We understand that the IRS has authority through administrative pronouncement via press release to grant relief for filing deadlines for those individuals in affected areas. We hope that the IRS considers some amount of broader relief than typically provided in disasters.” At a minimum, Porter explained, any relief should at least consider factors such as where the taxpayer is located, where the taxpayer’s preparer is located, and where the taxpayer’s records are located. “If any of those locations fall within the areas impacted by Hurricane Sandy, we request that the relief be extended to those items,” he stated. 

Relief is needed by many types of taxpayers, including some significant deadlines associated with exempt organization filings, where many of the organizations may actually be involved in relief efforts associated with Hurricane Sandy.

Full text of the letter is on Scribd for anyone who doesn't want to spend 15 minutes trying to find it on the AICPA's website. For those of you who ask the question "what do we pay the AICPA for anyway?" that letter right there is part of it.