Fort Worth Tax Law Blog

Texans gearing up for April's tax return filing deadline should be aware of recent modifications made to laws regarding taxes on foreign assets. In 2010, U.S. Congress passed the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which changes how the IRS verifies tax return data. IRS agents will now have increased access to overseas financial records.

Although the federal government has taxed earnings on foreign assets for quite a while, the way they verify the reported earnings has been changed. Under the provisions of FATCA foreign banks and financial firms will be required to turn over financial documents for their American clients if the IRS requests them. The IRS is ramping up their efforts to catch people falsifying their foreign earnings reports.

The Internal Revenue Service has announced new rules that some Texas residents may want to pay attention to. The first rule that the IRS has begun implementing requires the banks of customers who have offshore accounts to provide more details about their customers' income.

The federal government says the new rule has been imposed in order to prevent tax evasion by citizens who keep money in accounts overseas. This new rule, however, has not come without backlash.

As many people in Texas know, paying taxes can be confusing, especially as more and more people try to save money by doing their own taxes. There is plenty of room for errors. However, the IRS is not usually sympathetic to people they suspect of committing tax fraud. In a current case, the two men who handled a famous heiress' estate have been accused of committing tax fraud.

Heiress Huguette Clark, whose estate is valued at $400 million, died recently at the age of 104. She is the daughter of former U.S. Senator William Andrews Clark, who made his fortune mining copper. Clark had been living in seclusion in a hospital for more than 20 years before her death, and now her attorney and accountant have been accused of committing tax fraud when dealing with the heiress' finances.

An apparent misunderstanding has a Schertz, Texas, real estate investor facing probation after being found guilty of tax evasion in another state.

The 73-year-old man owned National Real Estate Traders Inc., which operated in the St. Paul, Minnesota, area for many years. Investigators determined that the man and his wife had not paid tax on the income generated from the business and had not filed income taxes since 1996. The man countered that he did not report income or file taxes because he only received Social Security.