Hiding Income from the IRS to Get Harder
Originally Published by Wall Street Journal
Buried in the housing bill signed by President Bush last week is a measure designed to make it a lot harder for small businesses to underreport their income. Starting in 2010, the bill requires payment processors to report annually to the Internal Revenue Service the gross receipts of credit- and debit-card payments made to each of its business customers.
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Treasury Group Finds Unlicensed Tax Preparers Make Mistakes
Originally Published by Cleveland.Com
Unlicensed tax preparers often make substantial errors, sometimes willfully, a Treasury watchdog office concluded after a limited study in which its agents posed as taxpayers seeking help in filing returns.
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IRS to Monitor Closely Held Firms' Distributions
Originally Published by Crain's Cleveland Business
The Internal Reveue Service has promised to step up its examination of closely held businesses, and the shareholder/employees of closely held corporations may be its target.Likely to be at the center of such audits is the reasonableness of compensation paid to shareholder/ employees of both C corporations and S corporations. In challenging the reasonableness of compensation paid to shareholder/employees of closely held corporations, the IRS often takes what appears to be conflicting positions.
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Small Businesses Fight Tax Paper Chase
Originally Published by Dow Jones Newswires
Accountant Paul Hense ought to love a new plan by the government to make businesses help collect more tax from companies they use for services. It could open up a world of clients for him. "As a CPA, I should be drooling,'' said Hense, who owns an accounting firm in Grand Rapids, Mich. Instead, as a small business owner, he is leading the charge against the proposal.
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'Tax Gap' Reforms Facing Criticism
Originally Published in the Arizona Republic
The U.S. Department of the Treasury is trying to recoup unpaid taxes, and the National Small Business Association and other opponents say many of the agency's proposals to do so unfairly target small firms. The Washington, D.C.-based organization has started a campaign to fight the proposals, which aim to shrink the "tax gap."
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Small Businesses Recoil at Proposals that They Bear Burden of Closing 'Tax Gap'
Originally Published in the Sacramento Bee
Don't close the tax gap on our backs. That's the rallying cry of small-business advocates who this week came out against proposals by the Bush administration to close the nation's "tax gap" -- the billions of dollars in taxes that Washington estimates go unpaid each year.
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WEBCAST: Claim -- Small Businesses Face Regulatory Burdens
Orginally Published in the Central Valley Business Times
The Internal Revenue Service is planning more tax audits and other changes that will impact the nation's small businesses, says the National Small Business Association. New regulations advocated by the IRS would require small businesses to withhold payroll taxes on independent contractors and report payments in excess of $600 to corporations of all sizes, even if a business owner is purchasing goods from a major retailer, the Washington-based lobbying group says.
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New Campaign Highlights Danger of IRS Proposals for Small Businesses
Originally Published by U.S. Newswire
The National Small Business Association, the nation's oldest small business advocacy organization, reaching more than 150,000 small businesses, today announced a new campaign initiative and Web site aimed at defeating Internal Revenue Service (IRS) plans to narrow the so-called "tax gap" by targeting the small business community. Letters delivered today to the chairman and ranking members of the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee outline the small-business community's objections to the IRS' proposals.
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Small Biz Lobbying Against Tax Proposals
Originally Published by the Associated Press
Small businesses say they will be unfairly burdened by Internal Revenue Service proposals designed to close the nation's $290 billion tax gap. The National Small Business Association, which has 65,000 members, plans to take its gripes Thursday (April 12) to a pair of powerful congressional committees. The group is rallying against several Treasury Department legislative proposals, including one that would require small businesses to report payments of more than $600 to other companies.
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Total Tax Obedience by Lawrence A. Hunter
Originally Published on IPI Policy Bytes
In "There's Gold in Them Thar Hills," (see below) I likened members of Congress and IRS bureaucrats to crazed gold miners lusting after an inextricable vein of gold in their relentless quest for "tax gap" revenue—they seem prepared to wreak all manner of economic damage and constitutional havoc on society in an effort to extract the unpaid 14 percent of revenues they think they're due. It turns out, I was too generous to IRS functionaries; they are more like religious fanatics than fever-possessed gold miners when it comes to wielding the Internal Revenue Code like a holy book and scourging the American public for not paying all the taxes that sacred writ demands of them.
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There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills by Lawrence A. Hunter
Originally Published on IPI Policy Bytes
Congress and the IRS bureaucrats remind me of old crusty miners obsessed with a vein of gold they know exists but have never been able to get their picks into. "There’s gold in them-thar hills," they rant incessantly. The only problem is, that gold is so difficult to extract, the collateral damage to the environment produced by trying to extract it would be devastating, and the value of the gold once extracted, great as it may be, is no where near sufficient to cover the costs of extracting it. Or take Antarctica, which is known to possess natural resources of enormous value beneath the ice cap. The only problem is, the cost of extraction in the harsh Antarctic conditions would be staggering, meaning recovery will not be economical anytime soon, if ever.
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All articles reprinted with permission