Associations

CPAs serving as chief executive officers, chief financial officers and in other financial positions are less optimistic about the U.S. economy than they were six months ago, according to the results of a semi-annual study conducted by the American Institute of CPAs.

Efforts to create a shared member database between the American Institute of CPAs and state CPA societies will be shelved indefinitely, after beta sites grappled for nearly two years with a flawed version of the platform.

Will the Certified Information Technology Professional designation survive?

CPA2Biz has developed an Audit & Control Technology Store to provide valuable product guidance, reviews and discounted technology tools to CPAs and financial managers.

The American Institute of CPAs has produced a toolkit for government audit committees, the third in a series.

The American Institute of CPAs has received a 2005 Summit Award from the American Society of Association Executives for its national 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy program.

The American Institute of CPAs has named Gary M. Scopes as director of international relations.

Efforts to create a shared member database between the American Institute of CPAs and state CPA societies will come to a halt, J. Clarke Price, chairman of Shared Services LLC, said last week.

One of contemporary accounting's most persistent issues has taken a turn toward resolution as the American Institute of CPAs and the Financial Accounting Standards Board agreed to consider creating some kind of generally accepted accounting principles for privately held, for-profit companies.

At the 25th annual American Institute of CPAs Technology Conference, both keynote speaker and tech guru Mark Minasi, and K2 Enterprise's Randy Johnston, who followed him, offered insight on the most important trends in technology, the latest products, and tips on everything from security to paperless systems. "The future will be like the past," said Minasi, "only more so, unless things change. Just like they say, if everything is going your way, you're in the wrong lane." Amidst the jokes and fun analogies to Star Trek, Minasi gave eleven serious tips to the accountants present at the conference, three of them on cultivating the press. Minasi said that developers can pre-sell their products by using the press and media to their advantage by simply alerting the press about their products. A strong Web presence (including a good Web site), good technical support, building good alliances, respecting cultural differences, and never underestimating the competition were some of the other tips that Minasi had for his fellow CPAs and CITPs. Johnston took a more serious tone when he took the stage, with his tips on paperless systems, business analytic software and security issues. The Kansas-native technology consultant also announced the MS Server 2003 ship date as December 7, and touched on radio frequency identification technology, a technology similar to barcodes, only the line of information does not need to be read and can go so far as to be implanted into health care patients' arms, so their medical history is literally on file within them. "The No. 1 thing going on in the marketplace this year is managed services," Johnston continued. "It drives IT costs down but reliability up, with the ability to do remote monitoring, patch or print management, monitoring DSL or e-mail -- it's done so easily and avoids downtime." A number of key mergers, product developments and innovations in technology affected the accounting industry in the last year, and Johnston tried to touch upon them all for the CPA audience. He also made recommendations on what products were worth buying, what software was not worth their money and what companies were not doing well. For the best accounting software systems and enterprise resource planning software, Johnston recommended QuickBooks, MAS products, SAP's Business One, Accpac and Peachtree, and Open Systems, which he claims can now run on Mac, Windows and DOS simultaneously. "We're seeing a lot of new tools for development, desktop use and server use," said Johnston, "It's a real important strategy shift, when we begin to talk about what Microsoft is doing with Office 12. It will probably be out in Longhorn in 2006 -- I can't tell you how long to will take to get stable, but it will be 2007 before they even ship the product. At least we know the 2003 family to be in a position of stability for next few years." Along with other speakers during the convention, Johnston stressed the need to build better security systems, which could mean outsourcing their IT needs and would include replacing their Windows 98 Office applications with XP or 2003.

The American Institute of CPAs has thrown its support behind the introduction of S.723, the SIMPLE Cafeteria Plan Act of 2005, which would allow small businesses to provide non-taxable benefits like flexible spending accounts to employees. The bill was introduced by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine. "We believe that now is the time to allow small businesses to offer the same health insurance and savings options currently available to employees of large companies and government agencies," said Tom Purcell, chair of the AICPA's Tax Executive Committee and an associate professor of accounting and a professor of law at Creighton University in Omaha, Neb. The institute also endorsed other provisions in the measure that would allow cafeteria plans of all sizes to offer long-term care insurance as an optional benefit; permit the carryover of unused flexible spending account funds; simplify and increase dependent care accounts; and curtail the "use it or lose it" rule, which causes employees to forfeit their own dollars to their employers when the dollars are not spent on health care or dependent care.

While lawmakers on Capitol Hill were embroiled in a heated filibuster debate, not far away, members of the ruling Council of the American Institute of CPAs passed a much less contentious vote, agreeing to support the development of standards for private and nonprofit entities.

Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which deals with auditing internal controls, has brought widespread agreement with the act's intentions and equally widespread complaints of increased costs and a disturbing lack of specificity on some aspects of the rules.

The American Institute of CPAs has published a new best practices guide for audit committees of not-for-profit organizations.

The American Institute of CPAs has named Gary M. Scopes as director of international relations.

A crackdown on abusive tax shelters that includes codifying the economic substance doctrine would create legal booby traps for small businesses and open the door for new abuses by unscrupulous tax shelter promoters, the American Institute of CPAs warned Congress.

With its role in standard-setting now clearly defined, the Auditing Standards Board has been making up for lost time as it moves toward a series of new proposed standards.

The American Institute of CPAs has expanded upon its 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy program with the launch of a financial literacy program targeted at women.

Nearly four years after its debut, CPA2Biz, the online portal of the American Institute of CPAs, is projecting that the Web vehicle will turn a profit in 2006.

The American Institute of CPAs bestowed awards upon two members and an accounting firm during its Spring Meeting of Council here this week.