Michael Cohn

There’s a certain amount of suspense these days in our nation’s capital about what’s going to happen not only with health care reform, but also financial regulations.

President Obama is widely expected to call for a three-year spending freeze on key areas of his discretionary budget during the State of the Union address on Wednesday evening, but critics are already warning that now is not the time to cut spending just as the country is emerging from a recession.

The devastating earthquake in Haiti last week is spurring relief efforts from countries around the world, but the U.S. is playing a key role in providing both help and security, along with much-needed funds.

A group of top central bank governors is calling for accounting standard-setters to develop a provisioning approach for troubled loans based on an expected-losses model rather than fair value.

Call it what you like, but the first decade of the millennium has passed with many a whimper.

Everybody has to have a Top 10 list around the New Year, and looking back over the past year, we found that WebCPA readers clicked the most on stories about taxes and accounting firm rankings.

The Senate’s brand-new 10 percent tax on indoor tanning services is bound to lead to some further creative thinking about how to generate extra revenue to cover the costs of health care reform.

The case of Bernard Madoff’s former auditor, David Friehling, has cast the ethics of the accounting profession into a harsh light and forced his state CPA society to take action.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is facing an uncertain future after several justices on the high court appeared to side with the accounting firm and conservative group that hope to prove the board is unconstitutional.

Businesses will have to act soon on a bevy of tax breaks before they expire at the end of the year.

A group of Democratic lawmakers has introduced a bill that would impose a temporary war surtax beginning in 2011 to pay for the war in Afghanistan.

Wayne Carnall, the chief accountant in the SEC’s Division of Corporate Finance, had some good advice to dispense to corporate accountants on keeping out of hot water with his department.

If you look closely at our home page, you might notice a subtle change at the top of our channel selections.

The IRS’s plans to create a new unit to examine high-income taxpayers with complex offshore tax structures could prove to be a boon to both accounting firms and tax attorneys.

IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman had some news for CPAs gathered to hear him speak at an AICPA conference on Monday: high-income individuals are going to be in the agency’s cross-hairs now.

The First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credit program may have helped boost the sagging housing market this year, but it also seems to have encouraged a lot of fraudulent activity.

The Supreme Court has agreed to take up the appeal of former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling whose company perpetrated one of the largest accounting frauds in history.

The wheels can sometimes grind slowly at the Treasury Department, and never more so than in getting the program up and running for relieving banks’ balance sheets of mortgage-backed securities and other undesirables.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and its global counterpart, the International Accounting Standards Board, hope to stay in lockstep on standards, but oftentimes it’s not so easy.

The SEC is expected to turn its attention once again this fall to the question of adopting International Financial Reporting Standards now that the financial crisis has eased.