IRS Seeks a Road Map to Aggressive Deductions - BusinessWeek
IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman says tax auditors waste more than 25 percent of their time combing through thousands of pages of corporate returns to spot errors and challenge deductions. Now he's sparked an uproar by asking companies to do a lot of that work for him.
Shulman wants those with $10 million or more in assets to provide the IRS with a road map of what to look for in their returns. A rule proposed on Apr. 19 would require companies to list all tax-saving transactions that might be challenged—along with the maximum they would owe if the IRS won on every issue. Comments from the public are due by June 1, after which the IRS could adopt the rule as final. The new form, Shulman told corporate tax executives in Washington last month, would be "a game-changer with respect to our relationships with and responsibility to our large corporate taxpayers."