With FATCA compliance on the horizon and the U.S. Program for Swiss Banks well underway, many U.S. taxpayers have been receiving letters from their banks requesting information about whether the accounts held at their institutions have been disclosed to the IRS and asking for permission to disclose relevant account information […]
Author: Lawrence Brown
The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) has been deeply controversial ever since it was passed by Congress in 2010. It has taken a long time for the new law’s implementation to take shape. The challenges have been many. As we discussed in our September 6 post last year, this […]
Although Pfizer Inc. will be saving hundreds of millions of dollars in annual taxes by buying AstraZeneca, Pfizer’s stockholders could end up paying more tax. The trigger is unfamiliar U.S. tax regulations that are initiated in a purchase of an overseas entity and relocation of a U.S. business. According to […]
Australian officials have designed a six-nation alliance to combat multinational companies’ strategies to avoid tax. China, Japan and Britain have already joined this Australian group and the United States is planning to join soon. Due to concern over potential outcry from many companies regarding the legality of the alliance, the […]
Let’s pick up the thread of a discussion we began earlier this spring about the tax treatment of individual retirement accounts (IRAs). Traditional IRAs and Roth IRAs have historically had significant differences. As we noted in our March 31 post, for example, contributions to a traditional IRA are still tax […]
The budget problems of the IRS have not only impacted the agency’s ability to offer customer service to taxpayers. Those problems have also affected the IRS’s capacity to conduct tax audits and perform other tax collection functions. As we noted in our March 11 post, the National Taxpayer Advocate has […]
Senators Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Carl Levin (Michigan) have announced that they are planning new legislation to fight corporate emigration to lower tax jurisdictions. Senator Wyden, the chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, views corporate flight to more tax friendly nations as “a serious symptom of our broken tax code […]
French President Francois Hollande announced Tuesday that he will move forward with his plans to cut public spending and grant tax breaks to businesses, while accepting the harsh reality of the French people’s unhappiness with his failure to deliver on pledges to turn the economy around. Mr. Hollande made it […]
After several months of investigation, U.S. prosecutors are closer to obtaining a guilty plea, as well as an agreement with Credit Suisse Group AG to pay over $1 billion to settle claims that the bank aided wealthy Americans in evading taxes. U.S. officials’ confidence regarding the settlement grows stronger daily. […]
The federal individual income tax filing deadline was less than a month ago. But given the complexities of federal tax law, there are also other filing deadlines besides that one. One of those other deadlines has historically been the June 30 deadline for filing the FBAR form. FBAR stands, of […]