Michael Cohn

It’s no secret that the legal profession has been facing a host of challenges in recent years, including layoffs and consolidation at many large firms and a steep decline in enrollment at many law schools as students who graduate are confronted with astronomical debts from their student loans and grim job prospects.

A new program allowing Swiss banks to cooperate with U.S. tax authorities means that the days of U.S. citizens successfully keeping their numbered Swiss bank accounts hidden from the prying eyes of the IRS could be coming to an end.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s recent proposal to overhaul the format of the auditor’s reporting model could lead to unexpected legal repercussions for auditors.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board unveiled far-reaching proposals this week for enhancing the auditor’s reporting model in what could be the biggest transformation of the audit report in over 70 years.

The deadline is coming up this week for lawmakers in Congress to submit their preferences for the “must have” tax breaks that need to be kept in the Tax Code under Senate Finance Committee leaders’ “blank slate” approach to tax reform.

The watchdog group Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington had a big surprise during a conference call with reporters Tuesday to announce the latest complaint CREW had filed with the Internal Revenue Service: the subject of the complaint joined the call and defended himself.

Actor Stacy Keach, who narrates the CNBC TV series “American Greed,” praised the efforts of the fraud examiners whose efforts put behind bars many of the perpetrators whose crimes are chronicled on his show.

The Internal Revenue Service’s string of video parodies unfortunately may be nearing an end, now that outraged lawmakers in Congress have put a series of IRS commissioners, acting commissioners, deputy commissioners and ex-commissioners on the hot seat.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly preparing to turn its attention to accounting fraud cases after being diverted in recent years to Ponzi schemes and subprime mortgage fraud in the wake of the financial crisis.

A group of CPAs headed to Capitol Hill yesterday in what has become an annual ritual as they pressed lawmakers to deal with the many issues that accountants and their clients are forced to wrestle with on a daily basis, including taxes and regulations.

The Marketplace Fairness Act, which the Senate passed last week, would require e-commerce vendors to collect sales taxes not only on physical items, but also on digital goods such as ebooks and music downloads.

Recent research into William Shakespeare by literary scholars indicates that he may have been a great dramatist, but he was truly the Bad Bard when it came to paying his taxes.

The promise of integrated reporting that combines financial reporting with a host of other factors, including sustainability, governance and community involvement, finally appears to be on the horizon.

The European Union has been considering an overhaul of the audit profession that could have a far-reaching impact on the Big Four.

The Internal Revenue Service has found that changes in Form 8863, Education Credits, are delaying more than 600,000 tax returns, many of which appear to come from H&R Block.

Taxes are increasingly spreading beyond national and state borders to make more of a global impact, affecting economic activity across the world.

Less than two months ago Washington escaped from the doomsday scenario of the looming “fiscal cliff.” Now it faces the threat of the less colorfully named “sequester” or “sequestration,” depending on who’s talking about it, but somehow the dire warnings of impending disaster are beginning to sound unconvincing.

Even though President Obama indicated only last Friday that the fiscal cliff deal likely to be produced by the January 1 deadline would be a basic package, lawmakers managed to come out with a surprisingly comprehensive set of tax provisions, some with long-lasting effects.

Wednesday was a red-letter day for many accounting departments, as December 19 was the busiest day for submitting expense reports.

The so-called fiscal cliff has politicians in Washington performing the political equivalent of a soap opera as they leave the country in suspense about whether they will manage to resolve a self-inflicted crisis in time to avoid a recession next year.