Michael Cohn

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.

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.