Taxes Blog

More taxpayers than ever rely on professional help to fill out their tax returns. Such expertise, however, does not let individual filers off the hook. That’s the costly lesson Stephen Woodsum and Anne Lovett learned. In 2006 the married couple got $3.4 million from the termination of a swap transaction. I don’t know exactly what

I’m feeling a bit left out when it comes to taxes. The problem is that I seem to pay them. Apparently, I’m doing something wrong. In the last few months, there’s been a lot of attention on the reported 51 percent of folks who’ve figured out how to avoid paying income taxes. A good portion

Did your favorite charity lose its tax-exempt status? Maybe.  The Internal Revenue Service has announced that around 275,000 nonprofit organizations automatically have lost their tax-exempt status because they did not file required annual reports for three consecutive years. This finding is critical not only for the groups, but also for taxpayers. Remember, one of the key

The U.S. economy has stalled. Concern is growing that we could be in for a double-dip recession. American workers, millions of whom have already given up looking for jobs, are more depressed and angry. Politicians are about to panic. So what happens when folks in Washington, D.C., start worrying about keeping their jobs? They dole

Ten years ago today the Bush tax cuts became law.  They were part of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001, and the key tax provisions were: Creation of the 10 percent tax rate for the first few thousand dollars of earnings. Cuts in the existing top four income tax rates, topping out

Raising kids is expensive, so lawmakers have provided a variety of tax breaks for parents. One of the best tax benefits applies to families that adopt children, especially thanks to recent changes to the adoption tax credit. Not only has the dollar amount of the tax benefit been increased, the credit is now refundable. That

Retirement plans have been getting a lot of scrutiny as Congress fights over ways to reduce the deficit and come up with a new federal budget. This attention isn’t new. Remember a few years ago when then-President George W. Bush talked about the cost savings of privatizing Social Security and how quickly that idea was

If you’re planning a driving trip this holiday weekend, I hope you budgeted enough for gasoline. Gas prices continue to be near $4 a gallon around the nation and are likely to hold there throughout the summer vacation season. Taxes contribute to what we pay at the pump. There’s the federal gasoline excise tax, which

If you plan to spend the Memorial Day weekend hitting holiday sales, then you’re in for some added savings if you live in Louisiana, Texas or Virginia. These three states are holding sales tax holidays this month. The Louisiana event, which runs May 28 and May 29, is designed to help folks get ready for

Is the Internal Revenue Service spending too much of its time and our tax money tracking down wealthy tax cheats? That’s the charge from one watchdog group. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a data gathering, research and distribution organization at Syracuse University, contends that the IRS’s Global High Wealth Industry group is not doing its