Practice Management

2009 HSA LIMITS RELEASEDWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has published the 2009 inflation-adjusted deduction limits for health savings accounts.

So far, 2008 has not been a year for major tax legislation.Nor, being an election year, are the remaining six months likely to offer major legislation. Two bills that did make it through Congress prior to Memorial Day included tax provisions focused on farmers and alternative energy and on military personnel and veterans. The farm legislation required the override of a presidential veto and included a procedural snafu where one of the non-tax titles of the legislation was not forwarded to President Bush along with the rest of the legislation. Barring any litigation over that issue, the enactment date of the legislation is May 22, 2008.

Profitability and being client-focused go hand in hand. Intellectually, all accountants believe this, but they have a hard time identifying specific actions they can take to maximize both profitability and client service. Over the years, I’ve observed specific client-focused activities that correlate to firm profitability.Here are 12 specific things you can do:

Accounting firm Weaver and Tidwell has introduced a financial services niche practice aimed at investment companies, including hedge funds and private equity firms.

The state of e-services today can be compared to where e-filing was about five years ago.“If you look back five years, what we were saying about e-filing would sound a lot like what we’re saying about e-services today,” said Roger Harris, president of Padgett Business Services and former chair of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council. “As practitioners and the IRS worked together, a lot of problems were solved. And today e-filing is the normal way of doing business. It will be the same with e-services.”

The Internal Revenue Service plans to hold a conference call on July 8 with the six largest audit firms to convince them to do more to help track the use of secret foreign bank accounts for tax evasion.

Gorfine, Schiller & Gardwyn has hired two former partners and about 20 former employees of Grabush Newman & Co. after they left Smart & Associates, which acquired Grabush several years ago.

CPA and business advisory firm The Rehmann Group, headquartered here. has merged in Novi-based Pew & Kearis. Terms were not disclosed. The union added four partners to TRG, bringing its partner total to 44. Pew & Kearis has subsequently shuttered its Novi location and moved into TRG's Farmington Hills office. The firm currently operates 12 offices throughout Michigan. Steven Kelly, TRG's chairman and chief executive, said the merger boosts the firm's strength in such industry niches as manufacturing, government/nonprofit, healthcare, retail/distribution, real estate, and closely held companies. The Rehmann Group ranked No. 38 on Accounting Today's 2008 Top 100 Firms list with revenues of $64.3 million.

The Justice Department has filed papers seeking an order from a federal court in Miami, authorizing the Internal Revenue Service to request information from banking and financial concern UBS AG regarding U.S. taxpayers using Swiss bank accounts to evade taxes. The Justice Department is seeking permission to allow the IRS to serve a "John Doe" summons on the bank. In June, former UBS banker Bradley Birkenfeld pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud the IRS by assisting UBS clients in avoiding U.S. reporting requirements on income in Swiss bank accounts. Birkenfeld admitted to conspiring with an American billionaire real estate developer, Swiss bankers and co-defendant Mario Staggl to help the developer evade paying $7.2 million in taxes by helping him conceal $200 million of assets in Switzerland and Liechtenstein. According to Birkenfeld,, UBS employees assisted wealthy U.S. clients in hiding offshore assets by creating sham entities and then filing IRS forms falsely claiming that the entities were the owners of the accounts. He also claimed that UBS had approximately $20 billion of assets under management in undeclared accounts for U.S. taxpayers. If approved, the summons would mandate UBS to produce records that identify U.S. taxpayers with accounts at UBS in Switzerland who elected to have their accounts remain hidden from the IRS.

The Treasury and Internal Revenue Service have issued Revenue Procedure 2008-35, TD 9409, and Reg. 121698-08, which update the rules regarding disclosure of tax return information by tax return preparers.The new rules provide an exception that allows a U.S. tax return preparer to obtain consent from a taxpayer to disclose a taxpayer's Social Security number to a non-U.S. tax return preparer when: The U.S. preparer makes the disclosure through the use of an "adequate data return safeguard;" the non-U.S. preparer receives the SSN via an "adequate data protection safeguard;" and the U.S. preparer verifies the maintenance of the adequate data protection safeguards in the request for the taxpayer's consent.