FYI if you’re looking for a little extra cash this busy season.
Sorry, auditors – don’t even try it.
Related Posts
Christine O’Donnell Attack Ad on “Taxman” Chris Coons Uses Witchy-Sounding Music
We defy you to find more appropriate background music for a scene with three spell-casting broads cackling around a cauldron.
But what about that sinister rhetoric? Jim Newell over at Gawker suggests that the ad channels a viral ‘Bed Intruder Song’. Reasoning that the lyrics “Hide your kids, hide your wife, and hide your husband, cause they rapin’ everybody up in here” translated into the “Hide your will, hide your lights, ’cause he’s taxing everything out here.”
Maybe Newell is onto something. If you just imagine boxy eyeglasses and a Members Only jacket combined with Coons’s textbook horseshoe balding pattern, he would have a über-creepy vibe going on. Plus he loves taxes! Yep, this ad is a winner.
[via TaxProf]
Gird Your Loins, Unscrupulous Tax Preparers
The IRS is on you like white on rice.
The Internal Revenue Service is taking steps to stop tax preparers with criminal tax convictions or permanent injunctions from preparing tax returns. This is just one of several recent moves to improve the quality and oversight of the tax preparation industry.
More than 700,000 tax preparers nationwide have registered with the IRS and obtained Preparer Tax Identification Numbers (PTINs). This nine-digit number must be used by paid tax return preparers on all returns or claims for refund. Paid preparers must renew their PTINs annually to legally prepare tax returns.
“We owe it to all taxpayers and the many honest tax return preparers to remove the relatively small number of bad actors from the tax preparation industry,” said Doug Shulman, IRS Commissioner. “Just one unscrupulous tax return preparer can cause a lot of financial damage to both taxpayers and the tax system.”
Nineteen ne’er-do-wells have already gotten word that they’ll be stripped of their PTINs for unseemly behavior of some kind or another. Best get that CPA so you don’t have to mess with the whole thing…until you the IRS lumps them in too.
SHOCKER: Tax Reform Will Have to Wait
If you’re like us, you’ve been anticipating the report on tax reform from the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board like teenage girls jonesing for New Moon.
Unfortunately, the report has been delayed and the Board will only be issuing “an almanac” of ideas at this point. The original deadline was for this Friday but you know how that goes.
Apparently you heeded the call put forth by the White House because they’re still reviewing all your brilliant ideas:
Tax Vox (our emphasis):
The White House statement says the board has not yet had time to review the hundreds of ideas it has received from the public. At the time same time, it asked for more suggestions. Yet, it is hard to believe that the panel is going to hear much new. After all, the ground of simplification and enforcement has been pretty well-plowed for years.
So keep those ideas coming people. Anything goes. Abolishment? Sure, they’ll think about it. Taxing the stupid? Best idea we’ve heard so far. If you’ve got suggestions, drop them here first then ring up the WH. They’re waiting.
White House Tax Reform Report Delayed Until Next Year [Tax Vox]
Also see:
President’s Tax Reform Task Force to Miss Dec. 4 Deadline to Issue Report [TaxProf Blog]
Tax Reform Panel: Something Someday [Tax Update Blog]