The IRS has issued ‘Security Six’ protections, a list of six security steps that taxpayers and tax professionals can use to stay safe from tax scammers. According to the IRS, there has been a dramatic decrease in identity theft fraud, which has fallen almost two-thirds since 2015. Yet, millions of dollars are still claimed in…
President Trump signed a new bipartisan bill on July 1, 2019 known as the ‘Taxpayer First Act of 2019’ into law. The controversial Free File provision was dropped from the bill after which it was quickly approved by the Congress. The new law aims to bring about changes in the IRS, including updating technology, improving service to…
The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made many changes to the tax code, but one of the most controversial changes was the cap of $10,000 on state and local tax (SALT) deductions. Since the new tax laws doubled the standard deduction (which will reduce the number of taxpayers who itemize their deductions) and also put a…
The purpose of Form W-4 is to help employers withhold correctly from their employee’s paychecks. Individual taxpayers usually use a W-4 when their personal or financial situation changes (such as after the birth of a child, marriage, promotion) so that they can know their changed tax liability and withhold accordingly. But after the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, even…
If you are a low-income taxpayer, you are more likely to be audited by the IRS than a wealthy taxpayer. One of the major reasons being that it’s easier to audit the poor. To audit the wealthy, the IRS may need lawyers and investigators, which they have a scarcity of because of poor funding. On the other…
Some of the well-known tax preparation services, H&R Block and TurboTax (Intuit), are facing a lawsuit for misguiding taxpayers. A Los Angeles city attorney has alleged that these for-profit companies …defrauded the lowest-earning 70 percent of American taxpayers by making it difficult for them to find free filing options such as the IRS free file and directing them…
The IRS has released the 2019 Employee Plans Compliance Resolution System (EPCRS) that allows businesses and organizations offering retirement plans to identify and correct mistakes in the form and operation of many retirement plans, including SEP and SIMPLE IRA. A retirement plan may lose its tax benefits if it’s not properly prepared. The 2019 EPCRS is an…
TurboTax has recently been in the news for the wrong reasons. ProPublica, a non-profit independent newsroom that conducts investigative journalism, has revealed that Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, deliberately made its Free File page not appear in search results. TurboTax actively added code to its Free File webpage so that search engines such as Google could not add it in its search results. …
Several new tax rules under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act left many taxpayers confused about their tax withholdings. The standard deduction was doubled, existing tax credits were changed, and many deductions were eliminated. The changes impacted millions of Americans, many of whom could not get their withholding correct and” ended up withholding much less from their paychecks, which lead…
The IRS might never be able to have its own online tax filing service. The House Ways and Means Committee passed the Taxpayer First Act, which can make it illegal for the IRS to create its free tax filing software. The bill includes many other provisions, including improving the performance, customer service and organizational structure of the…
