We’ve been hearing about the tax gap for a long time, long before the Internal Revenue Service released its 2001 tax gap estimates back in 2006. The release of those estimates seemed to simply add numbers to what everybody “knew”: small business owners who are not subject to either involuntary withholding or third party reporting [...]

There’s some very good news for microbusinesses from Capitol Hill this week. The Senate has voted to repeal Section 9006 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In case you’re wondering what that might be, that is the section of the health care reform bill that would have required business tax filers to file [...]

Earlier this month, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olsen released her Annual Report to Congress for FY 2010 and she has once again named tax code complexity as the most serious problem impacting taxpayers. The time for tax reform, according to the report, is right now. That is certainly something everybody in the small business community [...]

As much as I enjoy myth-busting, there is one bit of Congressional lore that I would have a difficult time refuting: tax-writing Congressional committees under Democrats are not friendly to small businesses. House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) has openly said that the Ways and Means Committee was not particularly friendly to small [...]

Barack Obama may have sailed into the White House on a rousing chorus of The Times They Are A-Changin’, but one thing that hasn’t changed a bit is that the tax gap is a headache for microbusinesses that is not going away. In fact, President Obama has been in office for less than 100 days [...]

The GAO has released yet another tax gap report undertaken at the request of Senate Finance Committee top lawmakers Max Baucus (D-MT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), this time a review of payer noncompliance with 1099-MISC filing requirements. The report found that the IRS has no way of knowing how many small businesses are required to [...]

Possibly you will remember the plan hatched in Congress calling for merchant account banks to collect and verify the taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) of the vendors whose transactions they processed and report those amounts to the IRS. In addition, if they could not verify a TIN, they would be required to withhold 28% of that [...]

A new report released recently by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends that enforcement action to address the tax gap should focus on the small number of large dollar non-compliant taxpayers, regardless of their structure — corporation, partnership, sole proprietor or individual. That, said panelists at a forum jointly hosted last September by the GAO, [...]

Robert Hughes, president of the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), was inspired to write the top two lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee late last month to warn them that a proposal to require banks to report merchants’ credit card payments was a bad idea. There are procedural and administrative problems with the plan, [...]