Practice Management

Carbis Walker LLP, a firm specializing in public accounting and consulting, is offering manufacturers and distributors the opportunity to participate in a national benchmarking survey through a partnership with McGladrey & Pullen LLP.

Jayne V. Bates is in the home stretch of her one-year term as president of the Association for Accounting Marketing, which will end in July. Bates has served on the association’s board of directors since January 2001.Herself a CPA, Bates is currently the director of marketing for Carter, Belcourt & Atkinson PA CPAs, a firm based in Lakeland and Tampa, Fla. She has been with CBA for nearly 20 years, spending her first eight years with the firm as a professional staff accountant and serving in a marketing capacity during the rest of her tenure.

When Matt Camden, chief information officer at UHY Advisors in Chicago, faced an audit server outage in one of his New England offices over a February weekend, he was able to restore his data in a period of 11 hours."Two of our disks failed, which is a terrible thing to happen," Camden recalled. "All we had to do is put new server hardware in place, which is our responsibility, then we got the data back up, loaded it, and it worked like a charm." He credited his online data protection company, EVault, for the rapid restoration process.

IRS REVISES OFFER IN COMPROMISE APPLICATIONWASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service announced that its revised taxpayer application for an offer in compromise, Form 656, is now available. The Form 656 package was last revised in 2004 to help taxpayers prepare an offer correctly and completely.

Strategies for the use of tax-deferred like-kind exchanges have grown over the years from almost exclusively a real estate concern to one in which billions of dollars of business tangible personal property are traded each year. While the main battle continues to be waged over what dissimilarities in property are allowed and still qualify as "like kind," another fight has developed over how the property received in a like-kind exchange is to be depreciated.After tinkering with the depreciation rules in 2001 and 2004, the Treasury issued final regulations early in 2007. In its preamble to the final regs, the Treasury admitted that confusion and resulting inconsistency among taxpayers had developed. The final regs appear to do little to end those problems.

Recently, a managing partner shared with me his answer to the question, "When does turnover begin?" His reply was, "At the beginning."Duh! Why didn't I think of that? So, if employee turnover begins with the selection process, what steps can we take to improve it? There are many steps in the recruitment and selection process - and as they say, the devil is in the details. Here are some suggestions:

The Canadian arms of Grant Thornton International and BDO International announced plan to merge their businesses.

The Government Accountability Office said that the Internal Revenue Service doesn’t appear to be in a position to develop its own software for tax preparation anytime soon.As part of its partnership with the Free File Alliance, in exchange for a number of tax prep providers agreeing to provider their software free of charge to certain taxpayers, the IRS has agreed not to develop its own software. But because increased electronic filing would reduce the agency’s processing costs, reduce transcription errors and speed up refund turnaround, the GAO was looked to examine the benefits and costs of the agency creating its own online tax prep offering.

In an annual ritual, many small businesses rush out after tax season to take their accountant's advice on the tax benefits of incorporation, and business software and services company Intuit has relaunched its online incorporation and document-filing services site to coincide with the rush.

A combination of both strong economic growth and low unemployment helped keep state tax rates flat for 2006. Nevertheless, some states are continuing to mine tax-related revenue streams."Currently, there are several states that are looking to improve their tax structure," explained Curtis Dubay, an economist at the Tax Foundation.