IRS Practice & Procedure

In an effort to better combat crimes involving stolen identities and tax refund fraud, the Justice Department is changing the procedures it uses to handle such cases.

Taxpayers who chose the wrong type of FedEx delivery service did not get the benefit of the timely mailing/timely filing rule and as a result had their petition dismissed.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service changed its criteria for accepting individual taxpayer cases for assistance.

A redesigned IRS.gov website went live on Aug. 30; however, the IRS also announced that it is taking down several of its online services during the Labor Day weekend.

The IRS Office of Chief Counsel explained what the IRS can do when a return is filed by an identity thief in order to generate a fraudulent refund and the IRS has issued a statutory notice of deficiency based on that fraudulent return.

Effective Aug. 17, 2012, the IRS will no longer use the tiered management process to set examination priorities and address important issues in the Large Business & International division.

Taxpayers who were convicted of fraud are precluded from later arguing that payments they received were not the result of fraud, the Tax Court held in two related cases

TIGTA reported that the IRS had missed 1.5 million tax returns with potentially identity-theft-related fraudulent tax refunds in excess of $5.2 billion for the 2011 filing season.