The Internal Revenue Service has announced work is underway on the Simple Notice Initiative, an effort to simplify and clarify about 170 million letters sent annually to taxpayers.  It's about time and those who have received one can certainly testify to that.

The Simple Notice Initiative will review and redesign hundreds of notices with an immediate focus on the most common notices that individual taxpayers receive. The redesign work will accelerate during the 2025 and 2026 filing seasons, improving common IRS letters going out to individual taxpayers and then expanding into notices going to businesses.

One of the biggest nightmares to straighten out is someone stealing your name and social security number and filing a fake tax return with that information.  It can take up to a year to straighten out the mess and your refund is held until it is done.  But, a very simple added precaution can stop those thieves dead in their tracks.  It is called an IP Pin.  If that pin number is not on your return, (you get a new one each January) then the IRS will not accept your return electronically.  Period.  So they can steal my name/SS# and try to file a return to get that free government money, but it will do them no good. 

Prior to 2020, a "Stretch IRA" was used to extend the tax-deferred status of an inherited IRA  when it passed to a non-spouse beneficiary (i.e. children and/or grandchildren).   This way you could pass an IRA down to the next generation and beneficiaries would enjoy the tax benefits of an IRA over their respective lifetimes.

Most of the revenue collected by the IRS doesn't come from payments submitted with tax returns. It comes from amounts withheld from employees' wages (income tax and payroll tax). Since they represent around 70% of the IRS's revenue, unpaid payroll taxes are taken very seriously.

If you have unpaid payroll taxes, you should address them as quickly as possible before the IRS assesses penalties. You should also be aware that the liability for these taxes is different than almost any other tax — the IRS has broad powers to collect some unpaid payroll taxes from multiple people affiliated with a business.

Payroll taxes are a common name that refers to amounts withheld from employees' paychecks to fund Medicare and Social Security. They are also called FICA taxes (FICA stands for the Federal Insurance Contributions Act, the law that created these taxes).

Although scams can happen any time of the year, they tend to be more prevalent during tax season. Scammers use tax refund time to target victims through various email phishing attempts, fraud schemes, phony phone calls and other deceptive activities. Here are four common tax season scams:

1. “I am from the IRS, and you will be arrested if…”

Beware of phone calls from anyone claiming to be an IRS employee or law enforcement officer. Fraudsters impersonate government officials to intimidate you, which is a form of social engineering commonly used by scammers. Some tricks scammers use are:

The retirement planning changes in a nutshell:

The person we know as Saint Nicholas (Saint Nick) was born around ad270 to a wealthy Grecian family. Tragically, his parents died when he was a boy, and he lived with his uncle who loved him and taught him to follow God. When Nicholas was a young man, legend says that he heard of three sisters who didn’t have a dowry for marriage and would soon be destitute. Wanting to follow Jesus’ teaching about giving to those in need, he took his inheritance and gave each sister a bag of gold coins. Over the years, Nicholas gave the rest of his money away feeding the poor and caring for others. In the following centuries, Nicholas was honored for his lavish generosity, and he inspired the character we know as Santa Claus.

The Treasury Department and IRS have issued proposed regulations regarding the sale of a taxpayer’s property that the IRS seizes by levy.  They actually make a lot of sense.