Audit & Accounting

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox is making a serious push to get more public companies and their accountants to start using Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, to publish their financial statements, and the day may soon be at hand when it's going to be required.

The October issue of our sister publication CPA Wealth Provider has some information which will shock most. It is a ranking of CPA firms with financial planning practices by assets under management. Eleven have over one billion dollars under management. Yes, I said one billion dollars each with Plante and Moran Financial Advisors leading the pack with $5.255 billion. There are 41 firms listed with $100+ million of assets under management.

A church is demanding a correction and an apology from the Internal Revenue Service after the IRS closed a two-year examination of its tax-exempt status that had been prompted by a guest sermon delivered on the eve of the 2004 presidential election.

RSM McGladrey said it would consolidate four of its consulting services lines into a single organization.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Dwight Sean Jones, a former NFL player turned investment advisor, with failing to allow commission staff to examine his business records.

Are more nonprofits slowly adopting certain traits of for-profit companies?The short answer is yes.

Tension can be a good thing - and not only for the pharmaceutical industry.Advisors who appropriately pull the right tension strings will be the ones who win the clients. The key is to recognize tension and either disarm it or increase it, as appropriate.

Alight Planning introduced financial planning and analysis software with collaborative budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting features.

New proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations to determine the value of a taxable estate may create a series of traps for unwary executors and tax preparers, according to the American Institute of CPAs.Moreover, the regulations lead to the situation where an estate must be held open for a number of years to determine the amount of the deduction for a contingent obligation.

Things change. Even assumptions. When assumptions change - assumptions about interest rates, discount rates, actuarial projections, and the like - other things change as a result.It was the war in Iraq that indirectly brought the issue to light. To the surprise of the U.S. Treasury, the extent of the U.S. military's costs for pensions, other post-employment benefits, and health care costs associated with the Veterans Administration appeared to be lower in 2006 than in 2005, despite an ongoing war.