Distilling the nation's complex tax code is the key to reducing the $290 billion tax gap, the American Institute of CPAs told lawmakers. In a hearing before the House Small Business Committee, James Brennan, chair of the AICPA's IRS Practice and Procedures Committee, said simplification should be the foundation to begin stripping away the mammoth deficit.

If XBRL is going to evolve to the financial reporting standard of the future, the accounting profession is going to have to step up its communication efforts on the tagging language, according to a survey of CFOs and controllers by global CPA firm Grant Thornton. According to the GT poll, roughly 85 percent of the survey participants indicated that the profession was not effectively communicating the benefits of using XBRL or Extensible Business Reporting Language for either internal or external financial reporting.

On the heels of its financial reporting roundtable last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission said it may allow U.S. filers to choose what standards they want to use to report their financials.

The President’s Identity Theft Task Force rolled out a strategic plan this week, outlining a number of recommendations for increased federal prevention of identity theft.

In anticlimactic news, former HealthSouth chief executive Richard Scrushy will pay $81 million to settle civil charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.While SEC spokespeople have said that the amount of the deal is among the most expensive for an executive settlement, a federal judge ruled that the judgments in three other civil cases brought against Scrushy could count as a $71.5 million credit toward the disgorgement to the SEC.

As expected, KPMG flung some mud of its own back at home mortgage giant Fannie Mae last week, accusing the government-subsidized company of breach of contract and fraudulent misrepresentation -- claiming that the problems leading to Fannie Mae’s $6.3 billion restatement were largely of the mortgage lender’s own making.

As an aspiring writer, my mother was once approached by a huckster-in-training in her Brooklyn neighborhood of Sheepshead Bay, who assured the-then impressionable 10-year old he could get her an “almost new” typewriter for the grand total of two cents.