Michael Cohn

The banking and insurance industries have been playing arbitrage with the various accounting standards produced by U.S. and international standard-setters.

President Obama described several ways over the weekend that he plans to help Americans save more for their golden years, but reducing unemployment and reversing the stagnation of wages are going to do the most good for a secure retirement.

The government is about to start offering a Cash for Clunkers type of program for old inefficient appliances this fall, so why not cash for clunker tax returns and financial statements?

The extension of Ben Bernanke’s term as Federal Reserve chairman shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise, except to those who were hoping for better management of the economy.

The news this week about the massive hacking and identity theft of credit card data should raise concerns at CPA firms about how good a job they’re doing at protecting client information.

For its final pièce-de-résistance, the Treasury Department has sent the last component of its financial regulatory reform legislative onslaught to Capitol Hill, even though lawmakers have supposedly gone home for recess.

Tax collection rates around the country have dropped precipitously in recent months, prompting local and state governments to get tougher and tax more.

As Congress struggles to produce a health care reform bill that can be sold to voters during and after the August recess, one idea that’s emerging is a tax on plastic surgery.

Many shareholders would love to get a chance to vote on whether the CEO of a company whose stock price is going down the tubes deserves a raise next year.

The TV networks have been on a letter-writing campaign lately in an effort to dissuade Congress from ending the expensing of ads by pharmaceutical companies.

Ever since we launched a redesigned Web site in late April, we’ve been eager to add new features and we can finally roll out the first major one.

New Jersey Governor John Corzine must be breathing a sigh of relief now that his state has recovered over $625 million from a tax amnesty program.

Just in time for Jon and Kate Gosselin’s impending divorce, the IRS has released a very helpful form.

Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are being used to conduct investigations to uncover fraud and identity theft, but they could also lead to those same problems.

What can we expect from IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s proposal to set higher standards of conduct for tax preparers?

The Supreme Court has agreed to rule on the question of whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board as established under Sarbanes-Oxley violates the separation-of-powers doctrine and appointments clause of the Constitution. It’s not likely this is going to be one of those controversies that nominee Sonia Sotomayor will have to worry about discussing at great length during her confirmation hearings, but how about after she gets confirmed? One can only imagine how the transcript of the oral arguments might go.

It’s all too easy to confuse the Treasury Department’s recently issued greenbook outlining the Obama administration’s tax policies with the venerable women’s magazine, so here are a few examples of the ways they differ.

Accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron has assembled a team to help clients with holdings in Swiss bank accounts comply with the IRS’s stepped-up enforcement efforts.

“To boldly go where no man has gone before” could well describe the kind of work accountants have to go through with their clients’ shoeboxes full of receipts and bills.

Most of the major banks passed the financial stress tests with flying colors last week, in no small part thanks to some key concessions by the Federal Reserve.