On April 11, the U.S. Sentencing Commission adopted proposed amendments to the Sentencing Guidelines. The amendments will become effective November 1, 2025, unless there is some (unexpected) Congressional intervention. The biggest change is the adoption of the "simplification amendments," which...
Following up on recent posts here related to the back-and-forth CTA/BOI reporting requirements, about two weeks ago the Treasury Department publicly announced that the government will not enforce penalties or fines in connection with the beneficial ownership information (BOI) reporting rules unde...
Yesterday, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Texas granted a motion for preliminary injunction that asked the court to enjoin the government from enforcing the Corporate Transparency Act (CTA) and the Act's related federal regulations. The CTA was enacted in 2021 as part of the Anti-M...
Ketcham Law PLLC and Brian P. Ketcham are very proud to once again be named in Best Lawyers for New York in the area of Tax Controversy for 2025. Best Lawyers® is the oldest and most respected Purely Peer Review® publication in the legal profession. A listing in Best Lawyers is widely regarded ...
Check out some comments I gave to Gothamist/NPR about IRS-CI's investigative practices. “They're issuing summonses, they're trying to cold call people, they're knocking on doors,” he said, adding that one of his clients was arrested at 6 a.m. and another was raided as soon as he walked into wo...
Below is a link to a recent Tax Notes article by Nathan Richman that contains a bunch of comments from my former colleague (and all around awesome person), Caroline Ciraolo, and me about proposed Guidelines' amendments. If my career is remembered for anything, I hope it is my statement about how...
The (bipartisan) U.S. Sentencing Commission issued a press release two days ago that announced, among other things, a proposed amendment to the Guidelines that would prohibit federal district judges from considering acquitted conduct when determining a defendant's sentence (a practice that has of...
Please check out this article I wrote for Bloomberg about the LLC Transparency bill now pending on Governor Hochul's desk. As I suggest in the article, my best guess is that many LLCs won't have much incentive to comply with the new law, should it be enacted.
As I wrote in my post on May 11, 2023, the Sentencing Commission has adopted amendments to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines for the first time in years. Absent Congressional overrule, the amendments are set to become effective on November 1, 2023. As noted previously, the new Section 4C1.1 provis...
As many already know, the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines play a pivotal role in criminal cases, whether determining a client's pre-indictment exposure, negotiating plea agreements, evaluating presentence investigation reports, and when advocating for someone at a sentencing hearing. Since the Supreme...
For the past fifteen years—since the government's enforcement initiatives directed at foreign account reporting compliance—the IRS has often imposed massive financial penalties for a taxpayer's failure to include Forms 5471 with his or her tax return. Form 5471 is filed annually to report one's ...
Yesterday, in Bittner vs. United States, 598 U.S. ______ (2023), the Supreme Court resolved a split between the Ninth and Fifth Circuits on the question of whether penalties for non-willful FBAR violations accrue on a per-report or per-violation (i.e., per-account) basis. The facts of the Bittne...
A memorandum issued last month by the IRS's Acting Director for Collection Policy sets out interim guidance for IRS Revenue Officers (the IRS personnel responsible for collecting assessed tax and/or penalty liabilities) in connection with various international tools available to collect taxpayer ...
Earlier today (Nov. 30, 2022), the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a precedential opinion that invalidates the “intended loss” provision described in the Application Notes to Section 2B1.1 of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines. See United States v. Banks, Case Nos. 19-3812 & 20-2235 (3...
Earlier this month the IRS announced sweeping penalty relief for millions of taxpayers who filed their 2019 and/or 2020 tax returns late. See IRS Notice 2022-36; IR-2022-155. The relief is targeted at taxpayers who may have struggled in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but it is not limited t...
In an opinion filed yesterday in the Southern District of New York, U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil denied a motion for summary judgment filed by the government that sought a ruling that a taxpayer's failure to file an FBAR was willful as a matter of law, rejecting the government's position...
For decades the IRS Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) division has provided an opportunity for taxpayers with previously undisclosed income or other tax issues to voluntarily contact the IRS, disclose the problem, and resolve any issues with a civil settlement. As long as a voluntary disclosure is...
As many tax controversy practitioners have learned since the advent of the first IRS Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Program (OVDP), some cases just won't die, even since the OVDP's sunset in 2018. Some cases turned out to be very complex, other cases involved long tortuous procedures to obtain th...
The IRS will now allow practitioners representing taxpayers with IRS matters to obtain 30 client transcripts per call to the Practitioner Priority Service (PPS) hotline (although it can of course take a lifetime to actually get through to someone via the hotline). The new limit was announced in ...
A recent criminal complaint filed in the Eastern District of New York (EDNY) is of special interest to me for two reasons. First, I worked in the EDNY for about nine years, initially as part of the Clerk's Office staff and, following law school, as a judicial law clerk. Second, the case involve...
In an issue of first impression in the Second Circuit, a trial court in the District of Connecticut earlier this week held that the $10,000 statutory cap for non-willful FBAR violations must be calculated on a per FBAR form basis and not based on the number of non-compliant accounts. United St...
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