As much as I enjoy myth-busting, there is one bit of Congressional lore that I would have a difficult time refuting: tax-writing Congressional committees under Democrats are not friendly to small businesses. House Small Business Committee Chairwoman Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) has openly said that the Ways and Means Committee was not particularly friendly to small [...]

Barack Obama may have sailed into the White House on a rousing chorus of The Times They Are A-Changin’, but one thing that hasn’t changed a bit is that the tax gap is a headache for microbusinesses that is not going away. In fact, President Obama has been in office for less than 100 days [...]

The GAO has released yet another tax gap report undertaken at the request of Senate Finance Committee top lawmakers Max Baucus (D-MT) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), this time a review of payer noncompliance with 1099-MISC filing requirements. The report found that the IRS has no way of knowing how many small businesses are required to [...]

Possibly you will remember the plan hatched in Congress calling for merchant account banks to collect and verify the taxpayer identification numbers (TINs) of the vendors whose transactions they processed and report those amounts to the IRS. In addition, if they could not verify a TIN, they would be required to withhold 28% of that [...]

A new report released recently by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommends that enforcement action to address the tax gap should focus on the small number of large dollar non-compliant taxpayers, regardless of their structure — corporation, partnership, sole proprietor or individual. That, said panelists at a forum jointly hosted last September by the GAO, [...]

Robert Hughes, president of the National Association for the Self-Employed (NASE), was inspired to write the top two lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee late last month to warn them that a proposal to require banks to report merchants’ credit card payments was a bad idea. There are procedural and administrative problems with the plan, [...]