In the blogs: Mind your FAQs

Public offers; a second soda tax mess; never fail to put off; and other highlights from our favorite tax bloggers.

Mind your FAQs

• Current Federal Tax Developments (https://www.currentfederaltaxdevelopments.com/): A look at the new question of the wage page on Schedules K-2 and K-3 for the 1065, 1120-s and 8865: “Is the IRS providing any additional exceptions for tax year 2021?”
• Sovos (https://sovos.com/blog/?region=united-states): The correct tax treatment of travel insurance.
• The Tax Times (https://www.thetaxtimes.com): Does reliance on IRS FAQs provide reasonable cause?
• Henry+Horne (https://www.hhcpa.com/blogs/): A look at recent big changes to the GILTI form, starting with the addition of a Schedule B.
• Taxbuzz (https://www.taxbuzz.com/blog): Over the last several decades, the IRS has become a convenient way to trim the federal budget, consequently leading to fewer staff to chase tax cheats. The passage of the infrastructure bill and the potential passage of the Build Back Better bill have substantially improved the chances that the agency will indeed be strengthened — as will enforcement.
• John R. Dundon II EA (https://www.johnrdundon.com/): Favorite opening of the week: “‘Understanding Schedule M-2 on IRS Forms 1120 and 1120-s is being brought to you from the rear passenger seat of [the blogger’s] Toyota Sienna while commuting back to Fort Collins, Colorado…” The M-2 is getting more attention these days as one of the places non-taxable income is reported, which incidentally due to the plethora of Paycheck Protection Program loan forgiveness programs to small-business owners, has “arrived in droves.”
• Taxing Subjects (https://www.drakesoftware.com/blog): Seems the IRS wants college students to be a little smarter when it comes to their scholarships and any emergency grants they may have gotten due to the pandemic: The agency has updated its FAQs in its webpage on Higher Education Emergency Grants.
• Procedurally Taxing (https://procedurallytaxing.com): Would making accepted offers in compromise public save the IRS money while increasing transparency? If so, has anything been done to further this previously floated idea?

Everything you want to know

• Taxjar (https://www.taxjar.com/resources/blog): Sales tax due dates for March.
• HBK (https://hbkcpa.com/insights/): General tips for your manufacturing clients during these troubled, inflationary, supply-chain-mucked-up times.
• Sikich (https://www.sikich.com/insights/): In the past 17 years there’s been a 140% growth in remote work with non-self-employed workers. With that in mind, who really knows what the term “modern workplace” actually means?
• Don’t Mess with Taxes (http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/): “With taxes, unlike the weather, there is a possibility for change. Really.” Ever consider membership in the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel?
• Mauled Again (http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/: Seattle’s soda tax has gone “horribly wrong,” meaning at least one city has mimicked what the blogger observed in Philadelphia two years ago.
• TaxMama (http://taxmama.com): Everything you want to know about the Enrolled Agent exam for 2022-23.
• Eide Bailly (https://www.eidebailly.com/taxblog): All the news that fits about the SALT-y and the sweet (tax cuts).
• Canopy (https://www.getcanopy.com/blog): CAS, CAAS, advisory accounting, accounting and advisory services — whatever you want to call it — involves transitioning to advisory accounting services rather than a compliance-heavy service. But what exactly is it?

Proposals and prosecutions

• Bloomberg Tax and Accounting (https://pro.bloombergtax.com/news-insights/): The blogger bets (and would win) that all of us could easily list two or three tasks, likely client-related, that we put off because we don’t know the answer or don’t know who to ask. Fortunately, recent research suggests that initially failing to finish a task can increase your motivation to complete it later.
• Federal Tax Crimes (http://federaltaxcrimes.blogspot.com/): Two recent cases have evoked memories of criminal prosecutions for promoters of abusive tax shelters: United States v. Daugerdas and Larson v. Commissioner.
• Tax Foundation (https://taxfoundation.org/blog): Ohio lawmakers have proposed to phase out the state’s gross receipt tax over five years. Ohio’s tax was implemented in 2005 as part of tax reform that lowered and consolidated business taxes and one of only a few gross receipts taxes still levied in the country. “These taxes are uniquely uncompetitive,” the blog notes, “discourage investment in the state, and drive inefficient business decisions divorced from economic merit.”
• Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (https://itep.org/category/blog/): Several policies might address inflation’s hard impact on Americans. A proposal from a group of Senate Democrats to provide a “holiday” from the federal gas tax until the end of the year is not one of them.