Taxes | featured news

The IRS says plans to close 43 of its smaller offices will have minimal impact on taxpayers and employees. The closings, to be carried out over two years, will save the government more than $40 million in office space and rent expenses, according to the agency.

Facebook Inc. co-founder Eduardo Saverin will save at least $67 million in federal income taxes by dropping U.S. citizenship, according to a Bloomberg analysis of the company’s stock price. Those savings will keep growing if Facebook’s shares increase.

It's a proposition some might find hard to swallow: a 20-percent tax on unhealthy food to improve the health of the nation.

An Obama spokesperson pointed out 98 percent of taxpayers earn less than $250,000, and letting the tax cuts expire for the wealthiest Americans would impact less than 3 percent of all small businesses. Obama has cut taxes for small businesses 18 times, including eliminating capital gains taxes on the sale of some small-business stock, the re-election campaign said.

You can get bad tax advice or no tax advice in just about any area of life, but from my reading of tax cases and some personal observations, I think that if you want to get really bad tax advice, you should get divorced.

As we have noted, the problem is more symbolic than real. Most very wealthy people pay a good chuck of their income in taxes. Reid in his statement pointed to “7,000 millionaires” who paid no federal income taxes, which is not very much out of the nearly 250,000 taxpayers who file income taxes with adjusted gross income of $1 million or more.

About 60,000 troops owe the IRS roughly $390 million in back taxes, in part because of confusion over deployments and address changes.

President Barack Obama called on likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to release more of his tax returns, in an interview with Univision released on Saturday.

Mitt Romney's campaign announced at 5:16 p.m. Friday that the presumptive GOP nominee has filed an extension for his 2011 tax return. "Sometime in the next six months, and prior to the election, Gov. Romney will file and release the 2011 return when there is sufficient information to provide an accurate return," wrote Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul in an email to reporters. Six months from now would be Oct. 13, weeks before the election.

President Barack Obama and his family paid more than $160,000 in federal taxes last year on earnings of $789,674, the White House said Friday. The president's 2011 federal income tax return shows that about half of the first family's income is the president's salary. The rest comes from sales of Obama's books.