In the Blogs: Choice Nuggets

Highlights of some of our favorite tax-related blogs from the past week.

Returns policy

• Tax Analysts: Hope for Trump: No less than Ronald Reagan wanted his tax returns kept private, absolutely no connection with “an unhappy history of tax disclosure … Reagan managed to keep his tax returns under wraps during his failed bid for the GOP nomination in 1976. But four years later, he caved to media pressure and released his 1979 tax return.” There we go again.
• Taxable Talk: There’s Hope Yet Dept.: When the IRS wrongly seizes money and gives back only apologies, we all become Americans no matter the political party.
• Roth & Co.: Time in this course of human events for some brutal common sense: making everybody (including members of Congress and the head of the IRS) prepare their own tax returns. By hand. “We have to show the government our returns, so we should get to see theirs.”
• The Tax Times: Foreign banks just a-keep on turnin’ over names of their U.S. account holders to the IRS. A look at the requirements on banks before they can have this kind of fun.

Choice nuggets

• Due Diligence: In this week’s collection: “Chamber Attempts to Thwart Pennsylvania Whistleblower Law”; “New Info on Pilgrim’s Pride”; “From Chicken Nuggets to Whistleblower Award?”; “Employee Misclassification FLSA Hit List”; and “First Time Workers Often Wage Theft Victims.”
• Procedurally Taxing: You Don’t Spit Into the Wind Dept.: Adams v. Comm’r,“a veritable law school exam question of how not to file a timely appeal,” and whether the Fourth Circuit was correct in dismissing the untimely appeal from the Tax Court for lack of jurisdiction.
• Federal Tax Crimes: Examination of U.S. v. Garrity, in which a wrongful disclosure counterclaim in a FBAR willful penalty suit was dismissed because a decedent taxpayer did not assert the wrongful disclosure.

Considerations

• The Income Tax School: The wake of the season might have you feeling jaundiced, but suppose somebody did ask you the “6 Things to Consider If You Want to Open a Tax Business”?
• ClientWhys: Your clients have events in their lives year-round. Each is a chance for you to make marketing a 12-month affair.
• IRS Problem Solver Blog: And on the subject of being there for potential clients even when they don’t know they need you: “8 Things to Do If You Missed the Tax Deadline.”
• TaxMama: Mama helps with a common divorce issue: seeking the personal residence exclusion when the ex-spouse in question made payments on, but did not live in, the home.
• Rubin on Tax: A look at the most recent IRS filing, income and income tax numbers from 2014. Everything’s up at least slightly, and some things a lot more than that.

MTC and POT

• Tax Policy: A look at Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson’s signing of a measure to generate nigh on $300 million for roads and bridges. Plus elsewhere in our noble 50, Maryland’s property tax hike and “No Maine Marijuana.”
• BNA blogs: Highlights from a recent issue of the Weekly State Tax Report include a “Gillette-style” MTC election case pending in Colorado, the Florida Supreme Court upholding the use of origin-based sourcing for out-of-state flower deliveries made by companies in-state, and the Washington Supreme Court rejecting a voter-approved initiative urging the legislature to adopt a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote for any tax increase. 
• Taxjar: June sales tax due dates, in order of state.

War and remembrance

• Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders: The dad of a man known to all in the profession has a name on the honored Vietnam Wall. Salutes to our vets need much more than one day of memorial a year.