Practice Management

I'd like to take this opportunity to diverge from the news of the week to expound upon a couple of topics, namely what has become somewhat of a religious debate over the cloud as well as some thoughts on upcoming vendor events.

The international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has produced an action plan at the request of the G20 finance ministers to address the problems of base erosion and profit shifting that are depleting corporate tax revenue as multinational companies transfer their profits to low-tax countries.

Seth Zarny, head of Raffa P.C.'s technology consulting practice, explores the renewed interest in CPA firms providing technology consulting services, and summarizes the reasons for successes and failures in this area.

CliftonLarsonAllen has acquired the Charlotte, N.C.-based accounting firm Monaghan Group.

A petition of nearly 4,000 practitioner signatures has gone to the IRS to urge it to reverse its decision to retire two e-Services products used to file disclosure authorizations and resolve IRS account problems.

Captive insurance companies, once the exotic plaything of large corporations, are now open and advantageous to much smaller companies. But most accountants don’t know enough about captive insurance companies to advise their business clients on the advantages of starting their own, according to Brian McCormick and Jerry Messick of Elevate Captives LLC.

For some companies that got a temporary reprieve from the IRS in the height of the recession, the payback isn’t going to be as bad as they expected.

The Internal Revenue Service’s inspector general told Congress he’s “disturbed” that he didn’t receive until this month a July 2010 document that mentioned scrutiny of “progressive” nonprofit groups.

CCH said it has been selected for the ninth straight year by the Internal Revenue Service to deliver sales tax rate and taxability tables to help millions of Americans prepare their tax returns.

Everyone is talking about moving to the cloud as though you can just snap your fingers and suddenly change everything from software to workflow to paperless systems. But the reality is that getting completely to the cloud, no matter how compelling, will take a while.