Purchase Order Funding for U.S. Manufacturers and Distributors

We have seen a move by U.S. manufacturers and distributors to boost exports. This year alone export finance numbers have doubled, which increases the demand for  purchase order and trade finance solutions.

According to the U.S. Commerce Department report, the increase between March and April reflected a $2.0 billion increase in consumer goods. Additionally, there was a $0.9 billion increase in capital goods as well as a $0.6 billion increase in automotive vehicles, parts, and engines. We have access to Lenders who provide purchase order finance solutions for growing companies benefiting from the export growth seen nationally.

If you need more information on Purchase Order Funding, complete the short, secure online form; only six questions, no confidential information required.  We will provide you with one or two of the best Purchase Order Funding Financing companies available.

We specialize in providing connections to Lenders who finance Government contractors in need of capital to fulfill or complete government contracts.  Whether it's mobilization funding or funding to bridge the acquisition or manufacture of equipment or goods

 

Get Your Supplemental Educational Services Financed Within 24 Hours

SES Invoice Factoring

We have a Lender who will finance invoices for school districts throughout the country. The funding program provides funding based on your current accounts receivable, NOT YOUR CREDIT.  Your credit is not an issue.

If you do business with a higher learning institution or a school district anywhere in the country, you can trade your invoices in for immediate working capital.  Just complete a short six question form  and we'll locate a Lender immediately.   Fast and easy approval.

Taxpayer Advocate Says IRS ‘in Crisis’ Calls for more tax preparer regulation

Washington, D.C. (June 26, 2013)

By Jeff Stimpson


National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson’s latest mid-year report to Congress calls the IRS “an institution in crisis,” with its many problems affecting its ability to conduct its mission.

While acknowledging the scandals currently engulfing the tax service, the report states, “The real crisis facing the IRS … is a radically transformed mission coupled with inadequate funding to accomplish that mission. As a consequence of this crisis, the IRS gives limited consideration to taxpayer rights or fundamental tax administration principles as it struggles to get its job done.”

The wide-ranging report identifies priorities that the Taxpayer Advocate Service will address during the upcoming fiscal year. Among them:

• Adequate oversight of the tax return preparer industry, and relieving financial harm suffered by victims of preparer fraud;
• Resolving erroneous revocations of the tax-exempt status of small Section 501(c)(3) organizations and failing to provide them with a pre-revocation administrative appeal;
• Effective, timely and taxpayer-centric relief to victims of ID theft; and,
• A congressionally enacted Taxpayer Bill of Rights.

Olson also released a special report examining the IRS’s use of questionable criteria to screen applicants for tax-exempt status.

Preparer oversight

Reiterating her longtime support for regulation of return preparers, Olson said that last January’s U.S. District Court Loving decision, which disagreed with the IRS’s view that it has the authority to implement RTRP requirements on its own, “is based in part on an outdated understanding of return preparation and filing. The return preparation industry has changed substantially over the last few decades as a result of the ready availability of return preparation software, refundable credits and refund-based loans.”

“The National Taxpayer Advocate’s main focus continues to be the retention of minimum standards for return preparation,” the report added. “The reinstatement or reissuance of the IRS preparer oversight rules would promote tax compliance by imposing minimum competency standards. In addition, questionable preparers would have less opportunity and incentive to engage in misconduct or fraud.”

“The National Taxpayer Advocate is concerned that taxpayers remain vulnerable to incompetent or unscrupulous preparers,” the report read, with an additional stress on taxpayers sharply questioning preparers about their qualifications and experience in preparing returns.

Olson’s report also urged Congress restore funding for IRS employee training, which has been cut by 83 percent since 2010.

It's Not Over; Trial Date Set for IRS Appeal of Tax Preparer Lawsuit

If you are a tax professional, you may want to read this article very carefully.  Know that there are thousands of tax professionals who are taking the competency tests and continuing education courses on a voluntary basis.  This make good sense for tax professionals who don't already have over 500 clients.  This is a wise decision for new and upcoming tax professionals.  It lets the public know that you are qualified.

 

 

 

Washington, D.C. (June 26, 2013)

By Michael Cohn

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., has scheduled oral arguments for September 24 to hear the Internal Revenue Service’s appeal of Loving v. IRS, the case in which a trio of independent tax preparers successfully sued the IRS to suspend its mandatory testing and continuing education requirements for tax preparers.

Three preparers—Sabina Loving of Chicago, John Gambino of Hoboken, N.J., and Elmer Kilian of Eagle, Wis.—won a victory against the IRS in January when U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg ruled in their favor and found the IRS had exceeded its statutory authority in imposing its Registered Tax Return Preparer requirements (see Court Rules IRS Doesn’t Have the Authority to Regulate Tax Preparers).

The IRS appealed, and Judge Boasberg clarified the ruling in February, enabling the IRS to re-open its Preparer Tax Identification Number, or PTIN, online registration system for tax preparers. The judge also clarified that tax preparers could take competency tests and continuing education courses on a voluntary basis, but they would not be required to do so while his injunction remained in place (see Court Modifies Ruling Invalidating Tax Preparer Regulations). An appeals court in the District of Columbia later rejected the IRS’s request to lift the injunction, pending its appeal of the judge's decision (see Appeals Court Refuses to Lift Injunction against IRS Tax Preparer Regulation).

The same appeals court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, has now scheduled oral arguments in the case for September 24. Up to now, the case has largely been argued and appealed in the form of legal briefs from the plaintiffs' and defendants' legal counsel, along with amicus briefs from supporters on either side, but the trial date will give the two sides a chance to air their views in court.

Dan Alban, the lead attorney on the case at the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm in Arlington, Va., which successfully represented the three tax preparers in their lawsuit against the IRS, is looking forward to the trial before the appeals court.

“As we’ve said since we first filed this case, Congress never gave the IRS the authority to license tax preparers, and the IRS cannot give itself that power,” Alban said in an email Tuesday. “The district court judge agreed that the IRS had overstepped its authority, and we look forward to making our case before the D.C. Circuit.”  Original article

 

Ups! Congress Considers Cracking Down on Corporate Profit Shifting and Tax Haven Abuse

Ups. remember those articles I shared with you about Corporate America's tax loopholes?  Well Congress is having "meetings"  concerning those very loopholes.  Things don't look for the continuation of Corporate tax loopholes.

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The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing Thursday to examine corporate tax reform and the impact of offshore tax havens on base erosion and profit shifting by multinationals.

 

In convening the hearing, Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., noted that the U.S. has the highest statutory tax rate in the industrial world of up to 35 percent. He has heard comments about that fact ever since the committee issued a discussion draft of international tax reform proposals in October 2011 (see Congressional Republicans Propose International Tax Reforms).

“Nearly all have offered a universal observation—having the highest corporate rate in the developed world along with an outdated international tax system is a barrier to success that leaves our country falling further behind our foreign competitors,” he said in his opening statement. “Academics and economists agreed, and also cautioned, that any solution to these challenges must protect against erosion of the U.S. tax base through the shifting of profits to low-tax jurisdictions. Their concern is not without merit. Oftentimes, multinational businesses reduce their tax liability by separating the jurisdiction in which income is booked for tax purposes from the jurisdiction in which the economic activity occurs. The result of these practices is ‘erosion’ of the tax base in a jurisdiction where the activity takes place.”  read more

Reminder: IRS Closed Friday June 14

We hope IRS employees everywhere have a safe 3 day week-end

Reminder: IRS Closed Friday June 14; Filing and Payment Deadlines Unchanged

The Internal Revenue Service reminds taxpayers that, due to the current budget situation including the sequester, the agency will be shut down on Friday, June 14.

Abatement of Penalities? Penalty Relief Modification for First Time Abate Policy

Here it is, the IRS is talking about abatement of penalties under certain situations.

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The Internal Revenue Service has modified its “first time abate” policy, which provides a one-time consideration of penalty relief, based on the taxpayer’s compliance history, for taxpayers who have been subjected to a first-time penalty charge.

 

The recently updated policy modifies the IRS first time abate policy for penalty relief, the IRS said in an email to tax professionals Friday. This type of penalty removal is a one-time consideration available only for a first-time penalty charge and based on taxpayers’ compliance history.

According to the policy, the FTA penalty relief option for failure to file, failure to pay and failure to deposit penalties, under certain conditions, does not apply if the taxpayer has not filed all returns and paid, or arranged to pay, all tax currently due. For example, the taxpayer is considered current if they have an open installment agreement and are current with their installment payments.

The FTA relief only applies to a single tax period for a taxpayer, the IRS noted. For example, if a request for penalty relief is being considered for two or more periods of a taxpayer, and the earliest period meets the FTA criteria, FTA would apply only to the earliest period, and not for all periods.
Penalty relief under the first time abatement provision does not apply to returns with an event-based filing requirement, such as Form 706, U.S. Estate Tax Return; Form 709, U.S. Gift (and Generation-Skipping Transfer) Tax Return; Form 1120, U.S. Corporation Income Tax Return; and Form 1120S, U.S. Income Tax Return for an S Corporation if, in the prior three years, at least one Form 1120S was filed late but not penalized. This list is not all-inclusive, the IRS cautioned.

The IRS said it would base decisions on removing any future failure to file, failure to pay or failure to deposit penalties on any information taxpayers provide that meets reasonable cause criteria.
Taxpayers who have been billed for penalty charges who feel they have reasonable cause, should send their explanations with their bill to their service center or call the IRS at (800) 829-1040 for assistance. Taxpayers may also use Form 843, Claim for Refund and Request for Abatement.

IRS Looking Into Ways to Pre-Verify Tax Refunds

The IRS has been way to quiet since the stick down of the Registered Tax Return Preparer ordeal and now we know a little about what they've been doing.


The Internal Revenue Service is exploring ways to improve its verification process before issuing tax refunds, but it needs to do a better job of managing the risks, according to a new government report.

The report, from the Government Accountability Office, noted that the IRS receives few information returns before issuing most tax refunds. In 2012, the IRS issued 50 percent of tax year 2011 refunds to individuals by the end of February, but had only received 3 percent of information returns.

 

Most information returns are not received by the IRS until after mid-April, and the IRS conducts the first match of tax and information returns in July, with subsequent matches in February and May of the following year. For tax year 2010, an average of over a year passed before the IRS notified taxpayers of matching discrepancies, which the IRS recognizes is a long time lag that burdens taxpayers. For tax year 2011, IRS matched over 140 million individual income tax returns against the 1.6 billion information returns it received from third parties such as employers. Generally, this match does not occur until well after refunds are issued.

In early 2011, then-IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman outlined a vision for a “Real Time Tax” system, a strategy to improve verification by matching third-party information to income tax returns during the pre-refund screening process rather than after refunds are issued. In 2012, the IRS launched a three-phase exploratory effort to assess the tradeoffs inherent in pursuing Real Time Tax.

Moving the matching of third-party information during the pre-refund screening process could have significant impacts on taxpayers, third parties, and IRS processes and systems. But it could also require congressional action to authorize changes to the Tax Code, including, perhaps, changes to some information return due dates. Considerations associated with moving the due dates include whether third parties have the information they need before the current due dates and whether they would have sufficient time to detect and correct errors before reporting. IRS officials noted that they do not yet consider Real Time Tax a “project” and have not decided whether to pursue Real Time Tax.

The GAO report acknowledged that the IRS is generally following leading practices in its Real Time Tax exploratory effort by, for example, dedicating a team and defining program goals. However, the IRS did not develop an overall timeline because IRS management views Real Time Tax as a broad goal, and officials wanted to avoid causing concern that the IRS had already decided on a path.

Without a timeline for the overall exploratory effort, though, the IRS cannot know if its efforts will be completed in even the broad time frames the IRS is considering, the GAO pointed out, and Congress may not be able to determine what legislative action might be required.

IRS officials stated that managing risk is a high priority, but they have not developed an overall risk management framework, as they are still in the early stages of the exploratory effort, according to the GAO. Officials said they plan to further develop the strategy if the IRS pursues the Real Time Tax effort. But without systematically identifying and evaluating the risks of Real Time Tax options, IRS officials may miss critical factors that could complicate the effort, the GAO warned. A record of prior risk analyses could help prevent unnecessarily repeating the same analyses.

The GAO recommended that the IRS identify time frames for the exploratory effort's critical phases and activities and develop a risk management framework for Real Time Tax. IRS agreed with the GAO’s recommendations.

“We agree with GAO’s selection of leading practices for exploratory efforts, such as real time tax, and appreciate acknowledgement of IRS efforts in implementing four of the six leading practices selected,” wrote IRS Deputy Commissioner for Operations Support Beth Tucker in response to the report. “The IRS also agrees with GAO’s recommendation. As the IRS continues to engage stakeholders and explore the real time tax concept, we will identify timeframes for critical phases and key activities and develop a risk management framework.”

Whose Preparing Whose Taxes?

A Closer Look at IRS 2013 Filing Season Statistics

More than 30% of taxpayers prepare their own returns at home, by themselves. This number has been growing year after year.

As the IRS Newswire - May 20, 2013 - shows in the 2013 Filing Season Statistics, self-preparation of individual income tax grew by 4.4% from 2012 filings to 2013 filings.

While the percentage of taxpayers using the services of a tax professional remains almost the same from 2012 to 2013, use of the IRS website to prepare individual returns increased by 24.7%. The fact that more people are using the free filing option available in the IRS website is another indicator of the self-services tendency in the tax return preparation industry. Read More