Audit & Accounting

H.D. VEST TURNS 25Broker/dealer H.D. Vest, which pioneered the strategy of using CPAs and tax professionals as financial planners, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Since its founding in April 1983, 47 states now allow CPAs to accept commissions for advising their clients and implementing investment planning strategies and products. Currently, H.D. Vest has some 5,400 independent advisors.

Grant Thornton has consolidated its advisory services practice, combining the firm's various advisory service lines and more than 800 professionals across the U.S. into a single division.

The American Institute of CPAs has begun publicizing the revised set of peer review standards it quietly issued earlier this year.

XBRL US, the nonprofit group working to develop the Extensible Business Reporting Language in the U.S., said it has finished codifying collections of financial and business terms for U.S. generally accepted accounting principles in XBRL format, along with an accompanying preparers guide.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board may change some accounting rules to make it more difficult for banks to get subprime loans off their books.

2008 was to be the year that companies and their tax advisors worked to get their nonqualified deferred-compensation plans in order to comply with the new requirements under Code Section 409A and the regulations thereunder. Recent positions from the Internal Revenue Service are, however, expanding the focus of compensation concerns for 2008 beyond deferred compensation to include deductions for current performance-based compensation.BACKGROUND

Just because the idea of violating a patented tax strategy sounds ridiculous on its face doesn’t mean you won’t get sued for using it.Currently, some 65 tax patents have been issued, and 109 more are pending, according to Eileen Sherr, technical manager at the American Institute of CPAs’ Tax Division. “Many of these are common twists on everyday transactions,” observed Sherr, who attended a recent Internal Revenue Service hearing on the issue.

The Treasury Department has released a blueprint for overhauling the regulation of financial markets to forestall future crises in the mortgage and credit markets.Under the blueprint, there would be a “conduct of business regulator” to monitor the business conduct of financial firms. The agency would assume many of the roles of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and insurance and banking regulators. The blueprint also envisions a “corporate finance regulator” that would encompass the SEC’s oversight of accounting regs.

Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson is putting new pressure on lawmakers to establish nationwide standards that would weed out bad-apple tax practitioners and serve to protect the more than 60 percent of taxpayers who rely on paid tax preparers.In bluntly worded testimony suggesting that she is losing patience with both Congress and her own agency, Olson called on the House Ways and Means Committee to move forward on proposals to rein in rogue tax preparers and protect American taxpayers from other forms of abuse.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed enforcement actions against global advertising network McCann-Erickson Worldwide, its parent company Interpublic Group of Companies, and two of its former executives, charging them with accounting fraud.