The CCH outage; dark influencers; prep and the military life; and other highlights from our favorite tax bloggers.

Return madness

• Taxable Talk (http://www.taxabletalk.com/): Good question for our times: Can a tax preparer leak a candidate’s returns?
• Mauled Again (http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/): A writer to this blog “purports to claim he has no interest in Trump’s tax returns,” yet he took the time and made the effort to welcome others to be interested in his disinterest. Oh, and the Tax Code is too complicated for anyone — with apparently this correspondent at the head of the line — to understand.
• Don’t Mess With Taxes (http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/): Favorite opening of the week: “Just when we thought we had made it relatively unscathed through the 2019 tax season…something happened.” The something: the May 15 deadline for some nonprofits and the disruption for Wolters Kluwer CCH clients in cloud-based services.

Time to sound retreat

• Solutions for CPA Firm Leaders (http://ritakeller.com/blog/): It’s the beginning of partner retreat season for public accounting firms — and along with the early-summer flowers will bloom the elephants in the room.
• Sagenext (https://www.thesagenext.com/blog): When you want your head in the cloud.
• Intuit Proconnect (https://proconnect.intuit.com/taxprocenter/): Is it a problem or an opportunity? How to erase the fine line between the two.
• Turbotax (https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/): How reform impacts ABLEs and 529s.
• Boyum Barenscheer (https://myboyum.com/blog/): Businesses of all sizes spend vast amounts on social media marketing. Social media “influencers” can help companies reach and engage customers. But not all influencers operate above board. Here’s how to avoid hiring or associating with a dishonest influencer.
• IRS Mind (https://www.irsmind.com/): Ten facts to ease their minds about IRS audits.
• The Income Tax School (http://www.theincometaxschool.com/blog/): Five reasons why prep is a great career after the military, including that it is process-driven: Much like where it’s all about completing the mission, there are a lot of rules and regulations to know and follow.

Plainly stated

• Wolters Kluwer (http://news.cchgroup.com/): Iowa reform changes sales tax economic nexus and other sales and excise tax rules.
• Tax Foundation (https://taxfoundation.org/blog): Like many states, Arizona is contemplating how to integrate peer-to-peer car-sharing arrangements into the state’s tax code. This session, the state legislature contemplated two proposals to regulate and tax peer-to-peer car sharing. Policymakers have an opportunity to clarify the tax treatment of peer-to-peer car-sharing firms and hosts while preventing the extension of discriminatory car rental excise taxes onto car sharing.

Offshore thing

• Mahany Law (https://www.mahanyertl.com/): Over a decade ago, Bradley Birkenfeld blew the whistle on foreign tax evasion schemes involving Swiss banks. How hiding money in Swiss banks to evade taxes is no longer a safe bet.
• Procedurally Taxing (http://procedurallytaxing.com/): In Moya v. Commissioner, the Tax Court rejected a petitioner’s argument that she could obtain relief in a deficiency case based on her assertion that the IRS had violated her TBOR rights. (The precedential opinion cites to Facebook v. IRS and picks up where the Facebook opinion left off.)
• Taxbuzz (https://www.taxbuzz.com/blog): Long a basic tenet of the IRC: When members of the clergy calculate their gross income, they’re not required to include the rental value of a home provided to them by the house of worship that employs them (a.k.a. a “parsonage allowance”). The rule was recently contested in court, with opponents referring to it as unconstitutional and a lower court agreeing. But a ruling of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that lower court’s ruling, upholding the original law.

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