Fundamentals of Income Tax Theory and Practice—2009

This book is for an undergraduate income tax course where objectives include learning tax concepts and how to prepare income tax returns.

Fundamentals of Income Tax Theory and Practice is developed to provide students with both the conceptual and practical information needed for a sound understanding of individual income tax at a reasonable cost. The text uses the latest information available from the Internal Revenue Service and combines it with background, conceptual information, and pedagogy to provide students with a resource that will enable them to learn to handle their own income tax, help others prepare theirs, and provide a solid foundation for those who wish to continue their study of individual, partnership, corporation, estate and trust taxes.

The text is designed around the IRS’s Publication 17: Your Federal Income Tax for the Federal tax chapters. Fundamentals of Income Tax Theory and Practice will provide context, explain concepts, and provide more examples. It supplements the material in Publication 17 when more needs to be said. Finally, the text will reinforce learning through the completion of end of chapter questions, short problems and tax return preparation problems. At the end of each chapter is a section on Tax Planning Topics followed by questions and short problems plus (in most chapters) one or two tax return preparation problems. Appendix B includes a comprehensive tax return problem.

We are excited to partner with TaxACT® to offer you and your students the ability to solve selected exercises in Dieter Kiefer’s textbook. So look for this tagline and link in the book - Do Your Federal Taxes Free - Prepare, print, and e-file free -TaxACT®, and your students can download and use the taxACT software for free to solve these problems.

Dieter Kiefer runs a volunteer service on his campus where students who use his book and take his class assist people in preparing their federal and state income taxes. It is this “on the job” usage of the text material that ensures the book’s contents are exactly the depth and breadth that a student needs to have a solid understanding of the U.S. income tax system.