AT Think

A San Francisco tax firm founded by a group of former Arthur Andersen partners has taken the questionable step this week of renaming its firm from WTAS to Andersen Tax.

The 2014 AICPA National Conference on Banks and Savings Institutions will be held September 8th through September 10th next week at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Washington D.C.

The third quarter AICPA Economic Outlook Survey, which polls executive officers, chief financial officers, controllers and other certified public accountants in U.S. companies, has found that one in five companies expect to hire new staff in the coming year.

I recently began a new client relationship with a partner who told me he hadn't seen much growth in his practice over the past several years. However, unlike many of my clients who aren't sure of why their practice growth has stalled, he knew precisely what was happening. He equated the stall in growth to his inability to spend time developing client relationships.

The research and advisory firm Celent has released a new report cautioning wealth management professionals to be careful about using personal information, recent location and analytical data in their communications with clients that could strike them as “creepy.”

As the current school year gets underway, it's worth noting which colleges stand out among their peers in the accounting field. College Factual, a site dedicated to assisting prospective college students, has released this year's top 10 schools for accounting. Did your school make the cut?

While the effort to pass federal legislation governing sales and use taxes on online purchases appears to have stalled, some states have begun their own initiatives to require online merchants to collect and remit taxes from e-commerce customers across state lines.

PwC announced today that its Minneapolis branch has donated $90,000 to four local non-profit organizations, made possible by grants from the PwC Charitable Foundation, Inc. The grants work in tandem with the professional services firm's Earn Your Future campaign - a program dedicated to addressing youth education through a combination of donations and skills-based volunteer programs across the country.

In response to an ever-changing workplace, and to ensure relevancy for the current generation of test-takers, the American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) is inviting key stakeholders to give their input on the Uniform CPA Examination, shaping the next exam directly via their feedback.

Ridgeland, Miss. accounting firm Horne LLP is fed up - not with a person, pesky law, or another company (thankfully). Rather, the $67 million firm is setting its sights on the formalities of accounting firm culture, going so far as producing a nearly six-minute trailer for "The HORNE Identity: Connect the Dots"; a cinematic take on Horne's anti-traditional views in a rapidly-changing workplace.