Practice management

A self-employed New Mexico tax preparer has been sentenced to six months in prison and six months of home confinement for failing to file tax returns for four years in a row.

Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., has proposed closing a tax loophole that would give Facebook an estimated $3 billion tax break on stock options for CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

With all the talk about personal and company branding, a wider problem can get lost in the shuffle - that of the accounting profession's brand. This was a central gripe during the first Innovation & Collaboration Opportunities event hosted by local firm New Vision CPA Group and its CEO Jody Padar in Schaumburg, Ill., which corralled thought leaders, influencers and prolific tweeters for a day of brainstorming the profession's direction.

In this Generational Viewpoints article, we asked members of Casey Peterson & associates ltd. (www.caseypeterson.com), a rapid City, s.d.-based accounting firm with two offices and approximately 50 employees, to share their perspectives regarding social media. Generation X senior-incharge Kayce Gerlach, born in 1979, and Baby Boomer president Casey Peterson, born in 1953, replied to the following question:

First things first: Is your firm ready to be found online?

Central to any functional succession plan is a focus on the clients, and seamlessly transitioning those relationships from one partner to the next.

The release of tax returns of presidential candidates has again brought popular media coverage of the issue of what is reasonable compensation for S corporation shareholders.

For most major accounting firms, the Enron era set profitability back decades when they were forced to abandon their highly lucrative consulting arms in an effort to shed even the vague appearance of a conflict of interest.

Establishing a brand as a CPA firm is something that can take a lifetime.

"We've got to have a Facebook page!" That's the exclamation of most CPA and accounting firms. and then, while many pages go live, they sit almost lifeless, as one of an infinite number of silent trees in a dense forest.

As corporate responsibility and sustainability becomes more ingrained in financial reporting among U.S. companies, a number of CPA firms are seizing opportunities to meet rising investor demand for that non-financial information - specifically dealing with a company's environmental and social and governance footprint.

KPMG BUYS INDIRECT TAX BIZ FROM THOMSON REUTERS

If FATCA isn't keeping you awake at night, it should be, according to practitioners. Ditto for FBAR.

Every business owner knows the drill: We made a profit this year so we need to spend our cash to save on taxes. I want to challenge you to think differently this year to “save cash,” not “save taxes.”

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs conducted a two-week-long enforcement sweep of tax preparers across the city and issued violations to one out of every three preparers it inspected, mainly for violating laws governing refund anticipation loans and disclosure of their true qualifications and fees.

The Internal Revenue Service disallowed nearly $1.6 billion in erroneous First-Time Homebuyer Tax Credits, but could have flagged even more, according to a new government report.

Now that the payroll tax cut extension is safely out of the way, the latest tax legislation gambit in Congress appears to be a tongue-in-cheek effort to provide an annual $250 tax deduction for people with mustaches.

The American Institute of CPAs told the Internal Revenue Service Oversight Board at a hearing Tuesday that the IRS needs to improve its correspondence audit program to lessen the burden on taxpayers.

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is allowing some extensions and exemptions to its new requirements that all FineCEN reports be filed electronically starting July 1, 2012, while pushing back the requirement for mandatory e-filing of FBAR reports until June 30, 2013.