Free Republic

A bipartisan bill reintroduced in Congress last month could offer long-awaited relief to small tech companies hit hardest by an obscure federal tax change — one that many founders say is threatening their survival. The American Innovation and R&D Competitiveness Act of 2025 (HR 1990), introduced last month by US Reps. Ron Estes (R-KS) and John Larson (D-CT), would restore the ability for companies to immediately take tax deductions on research and development costs, including software development labor. The act would undo the controversial Section 174 change that took effect in 2022, which now requires businesses to amortize those costs...

Three of America's largest tax preparation companies have been accused of sharing tens of millions of taxpayers' sensitive financial data with tech giants Google and Meta without their consent. A seven-month congressional probe, led by Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, alleges H&R Block, TaxAct and TaxSlayer used visitor tracking technology embedded in websites to share the information. In a potential violation of federal law, the investigation found data was in some cases misused by Facebook parent company Meta for targeted advertising. According to the report, alongside sharing data such as addresses and phone numbers, companies also shared details about taxpayers' filing...

Just performed the 1/19/2018 update on my tax software. I had expected that larger standard deduction to show up, but alas it did no. Does anyone know if that deduction will show up in the February update?

- begin excerpt - What Intuit did for tax year 2014 is change which services come with each tier, shifting some of the forms to the more expensive versions. They made the same changes to the pricing tiers on their Web-based service for 2013, so the change is not entirely unexpected. The first rumblings came as soon as the software was released last year, and some true early birds got a head start on their returns. They noticed that something was missing: some pretty common forms that had always been part of TurboTax Deluxe. These included: Schedule C (self-employment expenses...