Welcome to TaxBlawg, a blog resource from Chamberlain Hrdlicka for news and analysis of current legal issues facing tax practitioners. Although blawg.com identifies nearly 1,400 active “blawgs,” including 20+ blawgs related to taxation and estate planning, the needs of tax professionals have received surprisingly little attention.
Tax practitioners have previously lacked a dedicated resource to call their own. For those intrepid souls, we offer TaxBlawg, a forum of tax talk for tax pros.
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The IRS employs many lawyers and employees of the IRS Office of Chief Counsel are its principal legal staff who number 1560, of whom about 550 work in the IRS National Office in Washington, while the balance work in offices around the country. They provide legal advice to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue and the local IRS offices, and they act as the lawyer for the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in all Tax Court cases. In addition, some are specially designated to assist United States Attorneys in bankruptcy, summons enforcement and other civil cases.
In 1998, a Chief Counsel’s ...
Previous Blawg articles have cautioned my readers about the problems they can face if they do not take care of their Federal employment taxes, ranging from collection action against their business, to the trust fund recovery penalty being asserted against individuals determined to be “responsible officers.” Since Federal agencies are also required to pay employment taxes for their employees, it is only fair to wonder if the IRS is dealing as harshly with them. The answer warrants a letter to your Congressman.
On September 5, 2012, the Treasury Inspector General For ...
On May 5, 2011, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) issued a report that is not going to please anybody. It concluded that IRS employees are provided with ample information about their tax responsibilities to enable them to comply, but some do not, and the agency needs to do more to address the problem.
This is not the first report on the subject, following up on an Employee Tax Compliance program (ETC) initiated in calendar year 1995 “to insure that employees are held to a high standard of compliance.” In a December 2009 IRS Report, more than 97,000 Federal ...
For most citizens of the United States, the thought of an IRS audit is probably scarier than a root canal or a colonoscopy without anesthesia. As a result, people will be pleased to learn that the Internal Revenue Service is in fact "audited" itself, and sometimes doesn't like the results of those audits.
The notion of auditing the IRS is probably surprising. Most taxpayers know that from time to time their local media doubtless has someone who will find a horror story about a widow who really didn't owe any taxes but is being harassed because of a mistake made by the IRS computer, and from time to time Congress occasionally exercises its oversight over IRS operations above and beyond asking the Commissioner what he's doing about closing the "tax gap." But these contacts are sporadic, and there's a question about their effectiveness.