A critique of federal individual income tax policy, and a proposalfor overhauling the system that will appeal to ordinary citizens, liberalsand conservatives, as well as to experts.

Reviewing tax returns is a key part of tax preparation. It also is an area vulnerable to major bottlenecks and backlogs. Part of the problem is that there is no information or training specifically for reviewers... until now. Inevitably, firms have more preparers than reviewers. The latter are highly skilled professionals who are more difficult to train or find. Therefore, you must consider ways to reduce review time, even at the expense of adding preparer time. This book discusses methods to reduce review time, establishes who should do the review, distinguishes between content and issues reviews, identifies specific items for the reviewers to check, and offers administrative procedures to facilitate the review process. Reviewers are not born complete and ready to go, they are developed. The problem with many firms is that they take a reasonably good tax return preparer, with above average tax knowledge and they make them a reviewer, either on purpose or by default. In many firms a partner doubles as a reviewer. In some cases this partner does not even have reasonable tax knowledge, but they do the job because it needs to get done. This is not acceptable and does not assure a good product. There is a need and hunger for information on how to more effectively review returns, and this book is the response. Read the book, reread sections, use it as a reference source. Make your review process more effective. - from the Introduction

The Death of the Income Tax explains how the current income tax is needlessly complex. Daniel Goldberg proposes that the solution to the problems of the current income tax is completely replacing it with a progressive consumption tax collected electronically at the point of sale.

Accounting for Income Taxes is the most comprehensive review of AFIT research. It is designed both to introduce new scholars to this field and to encourage active researchers to expand frontiers related to accounting for income taxes. Accounting for Income Taxes includes both a primer about the rules governing AFIT (Sections 3-4) and a review of the scholarly studies in the field (Sections 5-8). The primer uses accessible examples and clear language to express essential AFIT rules and institutional features. Section 3 reviews the basic rules and institutional details governing AFIT. Section 4 discusses ways that researchers, policymakers, and other interested parties can use the tax information in financial statements to better approximate information in the tax return. The second half of the monograph reviews the extant scholarly studies by splitting the research literature into four topics: earnings management, the association between book-tax differences and earnings characteristics, the equity market pricing of information in the tax accounts, and book-tax conformity. Section 5 focuses on the use of the tax accounts to manage earnings through the valuation allowance, the income tax contingency, and permanently reinvested foreign earnings. Section 6 discusses the association between book-tax differences and earnings characteristics, namely earnings growth and earnings persistence. Section 7 explores how tax information is reflected in share prices. Section 8 reviews the increased alignment of accounting for book purposes and tax purposes. The remainder of the paper focuses on topics of general interest in the economics and econometric literatures. Section 9 highlights some issues of general importance including a theoretical framework to interpret and guide empirical AFIT studies, the disaggregated components of book-tax differences and research opportunities as the U.S. moves toward International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). Section 10 discusses econometric weaknesses that are common in AFIT research and proposes ways to mitigate their deleterious effects.