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.

In her 2019 Annual Report to Congress, acting National Taxpayer Advocate Bridget Roberts said the U.S. IRS needed to significantly raise its game with respect to the way it carries out its role as the nation's tax collecting agency.

But to "truly transform the organization" – which, she noted in a  five-page preface to this year's NTA report, Congress effectively called on it to do last year when it passed the so-called Taxpayer First Act – the IRS "needs to rethink the way it operates", starting with "a culture shift".

Laura Snyder, as we noted earlier this year, is the sole overseas member of a grass roots volunteer advisory organization known as the Taxpayer Advocacy Panel that works – alongside the office of the National Taxpayer Advocate – to call the IRS's attention to issues that American taxpayers are struggling with, but which the agency for various reasons may have failed to realize were problematic. 

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. 

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".

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.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has issued long-anticipated guidance on how Americans should report their cryptocurrency assets and transactions, and included details of a new "checkbox" that taxpayers must consider when filling out their 1040s.

Will a 'hard fork' result in gross income, and a reporting obligation for the U.S. taxpayer owner of the virtual currency subject to that 'fork'?

As reported, the U.S. Internal Revenue Service recently released some long-anticipated guidance on this and other questions, addressing how those subject to U.S. taxation should report their cryptocurrency assets and transactions.

Here, Joe Gill – a New York-based managing director in Andersen's U.S. National Tax office – shares his thoughts on the latest IRS guidance...

For the past four years, U.S. born, France-resident and French-speaking Fabien Lehagre has been fighting a tireless and increasingly hard-to-miss battle on behalf of all of France's and Europe's "accidental Americans"...