Wealth management

PricewaterhouseCoopers has just joined the rest of the Big Four firms in officially sponsoring the work of the International Valuation Standards Council, which aims to create globally recognized and accepted valuation standards, particularly for financial instruments, and promote quality within the valuation profession.

Global assets under management are expected to rise to approximately $102 trillion by 2020, with nearly 50 percent of them in North America, according to a new report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Internal Revenue Service has filed documents in U.S. Tax Court claiming that Michael Jackson’s estate has severely undervalued his image and music catalog, telling the pop star’s executors that the estate owes an extra $505 million in taxes, plus $197 million in penalties.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued a revenue procedure to help taxpayers with so-called “mezzanine” financing in workouts and similar circumstances when they have debts that have been discharged in connection with real property.

U.S. Wealth Management CEO John Napolitano discusses how CPAs can start a financial planning practice and how the initiative can go wrong, in an interview with Accounting Today editor-in-chief Daniel Hood.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has increased its enforcement efforts against lapses in accounting and financial reporting, while cracking down ever more on financial fraud, according to a new report.

New research finds that material restatements of earnings that involve correcting accounting irregularities and not just honest errors, lead to a loss in company credibility with investors lasting substantially longer than previously documented.

Successful CPA wealth managers share their onboarding secrets.

A roundup of financial planning news from the previous month.

The building blocks of a successful FP practice

Congress voted in December 2010 to let wealthy Americans make tax-free gifts of as much as $5 million—and the money flowed.

President Obama introduced a new retirement savings vehicle that he called a “MyRA” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, and the White House has followed up with more details on Wednesday about it.

While President Obama mentioned taxes a number of times in his State of the Union speech last night, the details were scant.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department have brought civil and criminal charges against a Chicago accountant who used his wife’s trading account to short-sell shares in the health care information company where he was director of internal audit ahead of the public release of the company’s financial results, earning more than a quarter-million dollars in profits.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued new rules providing an automatic extension of time for certain estates without a filing requirement to elect portability of the decedent’s unused exclusion amount for the benefit of the decedent’s surviving spouse.

The Internal Revenue Service has posted a final version of the form for computing the 3.8 percent Net Investment Income Tax that was mandated as part of the Affordable Care Act.

The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Education are partnering with accounting and tax software developer Intuit to raise awareness of income-driven repayment plans and other repayment options for federal student loan borrowers.

Despite a wave of accounting scandals at Chinese companies, a 58 percent majority of capital markets executives at investment banks believe the number of U.S. IPOs from China-based businesses will increase in 2014, according to a new survey by the accounting and consulting firm BDO USA LLP.

The American Institute of CPAs has issued additional guidance for CPAs who offer personal financial planning services, issuing practice standards that apply the AICPA's code of professional conduct to the PFP arena.

The Internal Revenue Service has released a set of proposed regulations to prevent abuses of the partnership basis adjustment rules, disallowing partnership loss transfers to avoid some of the abuses uncovered by the Enron scandal.