Latest news with #taxreturns
ABC News
5 days ago
- Business
- ABC News
ATO warns millions of Aussies claiming work-related tax deductions
Australians are being warned by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) to stop claiming private expenses as work-related or as donations on their tax returns.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Hartford man pleads guilty to tax fraud after officials said he filed over 100 fraudulent tax returns
A Hartford man pleaded guilty this week to tax fraud after filing over 100 fraudulent tax returns, officials said. Clyde Gibson Jr., 43, waived his right to be indicted and pleaded guilty Friday before U.S. District Judge Sarah Russell in New Haven to a tax fraud offense, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Connecticut. According to court documents and statements made in court, from at least 2015 and continuing into 2024, Gibson operated as a tax return preparer under the name Build Understand Destroys LLC, and charged clients a fee for the preparation of tax returns. Gibson prepared thousands of federal tax returns, many of which claimed false deductions. In some tax returns Gibson prepared and filed for his clients, he included false Schedules C, which reported that his clients had operated sole proprietorship businesses and had incurred certain expenses and losses when, in fact, they had not operated such businesses and had not incurred the claimed expenses. Officials said in some returns, Gibson included false Schedules D, which reported that his clients had incurred capital losses, including carryover losses, or bad debts when, in fact, they had not incurred such capital losses and bad debts in the claimed amounts. During the investigation, Gibson met with an undercover federal agent posing as a customer. The agent provided Gibson with a W-2 form for the 2021 tax year and offered no information about valid deductions for business losses, capital losses, and bad debt. Gibson initially prepared an appropriate return, on which the undercover agent would have owed taxes. Gibson then voluntarily opted to edit the return to reflect false and fraudulent information on the Schedules C and D. During the 2016 through 2022 tax years, Gibson prepared at least 135 tax returns containing fraudulent information, causing a loss to the IRS of at least $125,197, according to officials. Gibson pleaded guilty to one count of aiding and assisting in the preparation of false and fraudulent income tax returns, an offense that carries a maximum term of three years in prison. He is released on a $25,000 bond pending sentencing, which is not scheduled. Gibson has agreed to pay restitution of $125,197, officials said. Stephen Underwood can be reached at sunderwood@
The Australian
19-05-2025
- The Australian
Have hackers stolen your tax refund?
Hackers have harvested potentially millions of dollars from unsuspecting taxpayers by submitting bogus tax returns – and nobody knows how. Find out more about The Front podcast here. You can read about this story and more on The Australian's website or on The Australian's app. This episode of The Front is presented and produced by Kristen Amiet, and edited by Joshua Burton. Our regular host is Claire Harvey and our team includes Lia Tsamoglou, Tiffany Dimmack, Stephanie Coombes and Jasper Leak, who also composed our music.
Yahoo
12-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Major ATO change would see Aussies never file a tax return again: 'Trend will continue'
Simple tax returns could look different in the future under a major change in the way the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) does its annual assessments. At the moment, your tax return has to be submitted after July 1, which outlines your taxable income and any deductions that you wish to make. H&R Block's Mark Chapman told Yahoo Finance it can be "particularly stressful" making sure you dot every I and cross every T each year. However, this experience could be tweaked thanks to the data that the ATO is already able to collect about you. The ATO's Second Commissioner, Jeremy Hirschhorn, said tax time might soon be made even simpler. RELATED ATO 'hit list' revealed for 15 million Aussies as taxpayer's common claim targeted Accountant reveals $37 meal expense the ATO lets workers claim on tax: 'Without a receipt' $6 million cost Coles and Woolworths pay that Aldi refuses to cave on 'More and more information like interest and dividend income, standardised investment trust data, salary, health insurance data, and information about contractors are all going directly into tax systems,' he said. 'This trend will continue, and we'll see the classic concept of 'self-assessment' being gradually replaced with 'assisted assessment'. Those with a fairly straightforward tax return every year could be provided with a "comprehensive picture of their own data" when July 1 rolls around, which would take into account all these investments and costs. Under this new-look system, you would simply have to hit 'confirm' if all the data matched up with your own records. This type of "assisted assessment" wouldn't be available for those who have much more complex tax returns, as there are some data points that the ATO wouldn't be privy said this possible overhaul can be achieved by the way the ATO deals with information from "third parties". These third parties include financial institutions like banks, investment bodies, employers, health insurers and government agencies. Many of them are required to hand over their tax and financial information, which the ATO Second Commissioner said "fuels how taxpayers of all sizes interact with their tax obligations". Think of it in the way that your tax return can come pre-filled with information from your employer about what you've been paid. Back in the day, you would have had to source that information yourself, but it's increasingly being provided for you to make tax time efficient, accurate, and transparent. Because more data from more entities are complying with the ATO, it will have a better picture of you than ever before and you won't have to provide that information because the tax office will already know. 'Third-party data gives administrators the ability to feed information into the system that makes complying easier, and importantly, not complying harder," he said. Hirschhorn added that this harvesting of third-party data could increase in the future and, therefore, make your tax return even simpler. The tax system used to rely on four pillars of tax compliance, which were registration, lodgement, payment, and correct reporting. This put a huge emphasis on the individual taxpayer to make sure everything was accurate. But third-party reporting has been carved out as the fifth pillar and has become a far more precise method of correct reporting. "Modern tax administrators... will be asking for new data sources from companies holding relevant information, and tax systems will increasingly be defined around the fifth pillar of third-party data, rather than vice while retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error while retrieving data
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
IRS workers forced into ‘mandatory overtime' to deal with flagged returns after DOGE cuts
IRS staff have been told they must complete 16 hours of weekend overtime this month to help the agency process tax returns that have been flagged as containing possible errors. IRS Input Correction Operation employees working at the service's submission processing center in Kansas City, Missouri, received a memo from Operation Manager Latifah Hisham on Friday informing them that they must serve the mandatory overtime on the weekends of both Saturday, May 10, and Saturday, May 17, to help clear the backlog. 'Remember, if we do not make a sizable dent in the [Error Resolution System] ERS rejects… there is the possibility of additional required overtime,' she added, saying that optional weekday overtime would also be available but would not be counted as part of the required 16 hours. Common filing errors spotted by the ERS must be manually reviewed and addressed by staff, a practice that may necessitate mailing notifications to the people concerned before the matter can be resolved. The development comes after President Donald Trump assigned Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out excess federal spending and waste. This prompted the IRS to fire some 6,700 probationary staff ahead of tax season and reportedly plan to remove a further 50 percent of its 90,000-strong workforce through both voluntary separation incentives and involuntary layoffs. The Kansas City office is one of just three sites across the United States where the IRS still processes paper tax returns. The others are centres in Austin, Texas, and Ogden, Utah, although all three also oversee online submissions. 'Over time, there's been a lot of overtime worked, especially when offices were closed during the pandemic and there were millions of pieces of correspondence to be handled,' former IRS commissioner John Koskinen told Federal News Network. 'Requiring people to work 16 hours on the weekend, no matter what their other obligations are, is certainly not going to help morale at a time when the agency is already under great pressure and losing thousands of employees.' Kelly Reyes, executive director of the Professional Managers Association, told the same source that such an order was rare within the IRS and suggested that it might indicate that the agency was seeking to get ahead of the problem before it loses so many of its employees. 'I would be thinking, 'I'm getting ready to lose some folks. What do my inventory levels look like, and how can I make sure that I continue to serve the taxpayer through this process?' So that's a possibility,' she said. An unnamed employee at the Kansas City center told Federal News that they were 'stunned' by how many people had already left the workplace. 'Everything is a mess,' they said. 'People are sick all the time. A lot of people are despondent. It's eerily quiet. So many people are gone.' Problems at the IRS have been foretold ever since the Trump administration entered office and unleashed DOGE upon the federal bureaucracy. In March, it was reported that the service was bracing for a $500bn revenue drop because individuals were 'wagering that auditors will not examine their accounts' due to the much-publicized turmoil. Last month, acting chief Melanie Krause resigned in protest after she learned from a bulletin on Fox News that the U.S. Treasury had agreed to a deal to share undocumented immigrants' taxpayer data from the IRS's records with the Department of Homeland Security as part of the administration's mass deportation push. Krause had only been in the role a month after succeeding Doug O'Donnell, who had resigned in opposition to DOGE's activities. Then, as tax season reached crunch time, it was reported that members of the public were struggling to get through on the phone to raise queries about their returns. Staff 'basically tell us they don't have time to look at certain cases,' said Eric Santos, executive director of the Georgia Tax Clinic. 'The work is getting spread across fewer and fewer people.'
