No help for IRS efforts to regulate tax preparers. The Senate Finance Committee will consider taxpayer protection bills but Chairman Orrin Hatch’s draft excludes a provision to give the IRS the authority to regulate tax preparers. The GOP has long opposed the provision, while IRS Commissioner John Koskinen and National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson have both advocated for restoring the agency’s authority that was overturned in court. 

Balancing the ease of tax filing with the risk of fraud isn’t easy. Massachusetts Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren has a lot of public support for her bill to simplify and reduce the cost of tax filing. But if you’re a victim of identity theft, filing can be especially difficult. TPC’s Ellen Steele explains the challenges of the IRS-issued Identity Protection Personal Identification Number. The IP PIN can be a quick and easy way for a taxpayer to confirm her identity and prevent a stolen refund. But, if she loses the PIN, or doesn’t even know she was supposed to get one, she could face big delays when she tries to file.

Former Treasury officials urge current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to ease up on inversion rules. An almost exclusively Republican group of 18 officials spanning six administrations wrote Lew yesterday. They warn that Lew’s regulatory fix to curb corporate inversions could make matters worse, and want  the Obama Administration to find ways to reduce corporate taxes instead.

Connecticut would rather lose jobs than raise taxes. The state’s Democratic Governor Dannel Malloy says “We’d price ourselves out of the market” if the state levied a millionaire’s tax to help cover a $922 million budget shortfall. Malloy has now proposed a revised budget that covers the budget shortfall by  trimming expenses and cutting 2,500 state jobs.. 

Now that you filed your taxes… would you pay more? Vox uses its recent poll data to see if it can guess what your higher-tax paying preferences are. And you can see how you compare to those surveyed.

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