The U.S. Treasury Department and IRS have named an ex-KPMG executive to succeed Nina E. Olson as National Taxpayer Advocate. 

Top officials from the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation unit have been meeting this week in Sydney with their counterparts from Australia, Canada, the Netherlands and United Kingdom to "review" and "set priorities" in their joint "fight against trans-national tax crime," the IRS has revealed.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service this week undertook what it called a  "globally-coordinated day of action to put a stop to the suspected facilitation of offshore tax evasion", in partnership with the tax authorities of the UK, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands.

Two days after a U.S. District Court judge in Washington, D.C. ruled that he could go ahead with a legal challenge of a key component of President Trump's December 2017 tax reform legislation, Tel Aviv-headquartered U.S. tax attorney Monte Silver told U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and other Treasury officials in an email that their case against him had been "clobbered" by the decision.

An IRS tax guide published in January of this year and intended for "U.S. citizens and resident aliens who work abroad or who have income earned in foreign countries" contained a major error that has only now come to light, and which "may have caused certain married taxpayers filing separately to fail to file" a tax return that in fact they should have, acting National Taxpayer Advocate Bridget T. Roberts said on Friday. 

On April 1, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a report detailing what it said was the long-overdue need for the government to take action on foreign asset reporting. The report, entitled "Foreign Asset Reporting: Actions Needed to Enhance Compliance Efforts, Eliminate Overlapping Requirements, and Mitigate Burdens on U.S. Persons Abroad” (GAO-19-180), was addressed to members of Congress.

Fourteen days before Christmas, as American expats around the world were beginning to pack their bags and return to the States to celebrate the holidays with their families, the American Citizens Abroad formally reiterated its concern about a recent decision by the IRS to row back on a "temporary suspension" of a regulation that permits the government to revoke or deny U.S. passports to Americans "with open National Taxpayer Advocate Services cases".

A months-long campaign aimed at calling attention to allegedly erroneous and disproportionate penalty notices that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had been issuing, spearheaded by a Minnesota-based certified public accountant who bravely came forward to detail how five of his overseas clients had been hit with such notices, appears to have at last begun to have had an effect.

The Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department published their final regulations covering two major international tax provisions, the Base Erosion and Anti-abuse Tax (BEAT) and Foreign Tax Credit, both of which had been addressed in President Trump's Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Under pressure from European banks in particular, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has issued clarification with respect to a FATCA requirement that "foreign financial institutions" be obliged to provide the so-called Taxpayer Identification Numbers of their American clients from January, 2020 onward, which tax experts say means that banks now won't have to close the accounts of their TIN-lacking "accidental American" clients at the end of this year.