Top posts of last year; decades of breaks; parenting credits; and other highlights from our favorite tax bloggers.

Plan and superplan

• Taxbuzz (https://www.taxbuzz.com/blog): Savvy business owners — and the financial professionals who help them — understand that taxes are about more than just preparation, unless your client wants to risk leaving significant money on the table. How can proactive tax planning save your clients money?
• Summing It Up (http://blog.freedmaxick.com/summing-it-up): Many qualities and traits distinguish successful business owners, but there’s a common denominator: They understand at any point how their business is performing based on growth projections, execution, profitability and capacity. Can you?
• Solutions For CPA Firm Leaders (http://ritakeller.com/blog/): Happy 14th birthday to this fine practice management blog!

The game of battleship

• TaxProf Blog (http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/): “The Top 10 Tax Posts Of 2019” range from a taxpayer’s shell game that beat the IRS to prep software botching the job.
• Bloomberg Tax (https://pro.bloombergtax.com/news-insights/): Hard About Dept.: Several states have yet to enforce the new law raising to 21 the age for buying cigarettes and e-cigarettes, weeks after President Donald Trump signed the legislation. “You can’t just turn a battleship around on a dime,” said a spokesman for the Missouri Department of Public Safety.
• Tax Vox (https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox): There was V-E Day, then V-J Day, then, it appears, a long string of V-Tax Break Days. How effective income tax rates have fallen for the top 1 percent since World War II.
• Procedurally Taxing (https://procedurallytaxing.com): Guest blogger Megan Brackney discusses the significant influx in foreign information reporting penalties. Many of these penalties are systematically assessed, and automatically issued whenever there is a late-filed form or a form is missing information without regard to the individual circumstances of the taxpayer. And In many cases, penalties are wildly disproportionate to the taxpayer’s mistake and serve no purpose other than to discourage taxpayers from voluntary compliance.

And the children shall lead

• Liberty Tax (http://www.libertytax.com/tax-lounge): Raising children is one of life’s greatest joys and pains. And costs. Luckily, many of those costs can be turned into deductions and credits to save joyful and pained clients big on federal returns.
• The Wandering Tax Pro (http://wanderingtaxpro.blogspot.com/): What’s new with this year’s New Jersey state forms.
• Boyum Barenscheer (https://myboyum.com/blog/): What to remind them about how CPAs can help when a fraud incident leads to civil litigation.
• Turbotax (https://blog.turbotax.intuit.com/): “As parents, we work hard to provide our children with the best education, a roof to sleep under and food to eat every day. This valiant effort is not overlooked by the IRS,” writes guest blogger Joan Ferreira of blogfinanzas.net, providing three parenting credits as examples.