Michael Cohn

Actor Stacy Keach, who narrates the CNBC TV series “American Greed,” praised the efforts of the fraud examiners whose efforts put behind bars many of the perpetrators whose crimes are chronicled on his show.

The Internal Revenue Service’s string of video parodies unfortunately may be nearing an end, now that outraged lawmakers in Congress have put a series of IRS commissioners, acting commissioners, deputy commissioners and ex-commissioners on the hot seat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly preparing to turn its attention to accounting fraud cases after being diverted in recent years to Ponzi schemes and subprime mortgage fraud in the wake of the financial crisis.

A group of CPAs headed to Capitol Hill yesterday in what has become an annual ritual as they pressed lawmakers to deal with the many issues that accountants and their clients are forced to wrestle with on a daily basis, including taxes and regulations.

The Marketplace Fairness Act, which the Senate passed last week, would require e-commerce vendors to collect sales taxes not only on physical items, but also on digital goods such as ebooks and music downloads.

Recent research into William Shakespeare by literary scholars indicates that he may have been a great dramatist, but he was truly the Bad Bard when it came to paying his taxes.

The promise of integrated reporting that combines financial reporting with a host of other factors, including sustainability, governance and community involvement, finally appears to be on the horizon.

The European Union has been considering an overhaul of the audit profession that could have a far-reaching impact on the Big Four.

The Internal Revenue Service has found that changes in Form 8863, Education Credits, are delaying more than 600,000 tax returns, many of which appear to come from H&R Block.

Taxes are increasingly spreading beyond national and state borders to make more of a global impact, affecting economic activity across the world.

Less than two months ago Washington escaped from the doomsday scenario of the looming “fiscal cliff.” Now it faces the threat of the less colorfully named “sequester” or “sequestration,” depending on who’s talking about it, but somehow the dire warnings of impending disaster are beginning to sound unconvincing.

Even though President Obama indicated only last Friday that the fiscal cliff deal likely to be produced by the January 1 deadline would be a basic package, lawmakers managed to come out with a surprisingly comprehensive set of tax provisions, some with long-lasting effects.

Wednesday was a red-letter day for many accounting departments, as December 19 was the busiest day for submitting expense reports.

The so-called fiscal cliff has politicians in Washington performing the political equivalent of a soap opera as they leave the country in suspense about whether they will manage to resolve a self-inflicted crisis in time to avoid a recession next year.

It seems almost unimaginable for Hostess Brands to be going out of business, but the company seems determined to receive court approval of its bankruptcy plans, which will cost the jobs of more than 18,000 workers.

With tax cuts galore expiring at the end of the year, and steep cuts in both defense spending and discretionary spending on the horizon, Democrats and Republicans in Washington are doing a complicated dance at the edge of the so-called fiscal cliff.

The Internal Revenue Service’s decision to modify the timelines for withholding agents and foreign banks to comply with the stiff new due diligence requirements under the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act is providing them, as well as taxpayers and preparers, with some welcome relief.

Koltin Consulting Group CEO Allan Koltin described the best practices of high-performing accounting firms and partners during a keynote speech at Accounting Today’s Growth & Profitability Summit on Tuesday.

Financial whistleblowers are beginning to be treated with more respect by government agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

The American Institute of CPAs appears to be making progress on a Financial Reporting Framework for Small and Medium-sized Entities that it has been developing in the wake of the Financial Accounting Foundation’s decision to set up a Private Company Council, and plans to expose the framework by the end of the month.