Minnesota Tax Practitioner Liaison Meeting

Listed below are some notes and highlights of the June 2009 meeting.

Hiring:

The IRS is on a hiring frenzy and they expect to hire 4000 new compliance employees, by the end of fiscal year 2009. They will hire 1700 revenue agents, 1100 revenue officers, and 250 tax compliance officers. There will be similar hiring in fiscal years 2010, and again in 2011. The reason for this hiring frenzy is that the IRS has 68% of their employees with less than five years experience. Training will be more aggressive with these new employees.  During training the new employees will learn judgment and or discretion. These traits have been learned in the field in the past but now will be implemented with classroom training.

Minnesota will be hiring 11 revenue agents in June and 14 more in September.

Anybody need a job?

Speaking of new jobs; Pat Hammond, director, stakeholder liaison just hired Michelle Benson to work in stakeholder liaison Twin City area. A warm welcome to Michelle.

Compliance:

This is a big area for the IRS, and they've come forth with new initiatives for the upcoming periods to closer examine high income individuals, meaning gross income in between $200,000 and one million.

Another new area of compliance initiatives will be a partnership return, form 1065. This is new, as audits in the past, but very few for the partnership returns. You have been warned, and we need to look at our partnership clients. Just like in the past, they warned us about the 1120S audits now they're looking into both 1120S audits and 1065 audits.

Other areas of compliance initiatives are 1099OID schemes, and the IRS is looking into international tax and credit card transactions. Late this summer, the IRS will conduct a pilot program designed to match income from 1099’s  to what is reported on the Corporation's tax return. The IRS will issue form, CP2030 notices to the 1120 taxpayers notifying them the information the IRS has does not match what was reported to the IRS. This will be a pilot program not nationwide.  Best of luck to the IRS on this projectJ

The next meeting for this liaison committee will be December 2009. If you are facing systemic issues with the IRS or Minnesota department of revenue, please forward them to me and I will see that it's presented in the December meeting.

David Shabaz  co-chair IRS / MNDOR Liaison committee