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A BUSY SUMMER

As someone who managed to graduate college in just three terms - Nixon's, Ford's and Carter's - I was, as you can imagine, always somewhat relieved when the grading process in a particular course consisted of the basic "pass-fail" options. Several of my smarter and more ambitious colleagues, of course, disagreed with my position, contending that they wanted to know exactly where they stood in terms of a GPA. In effect, they were clamoring for more "disclosure," years before I would encounter that noun on a rather prolific basis as I began to report on the accounting profession.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board issued two new standards in late July that aim to improve government financial reporting in two timely areas: providing taxpayers and others with information about how past transactions will continue to affect a government's financials in the future, and clarifying the circumstances in which hedge accounting continues to be applied when a swap counterparty, or related credit support provider, is replaced.

After nearly a decade of discussions, white papers, presentations, work projects and comment letters - both pro and con - the question of whether the United States will soon join roughly 130 other countries in adopting some form of International Financial Reporting Standards still remains unclear.

With the current gift tax exclusion amount set at a record-high $5 million, many taxpayers appear to consider the gift tax no longer relevant to their planning. That may be a mistake.

CALIFORNIA

You can't get any more boring than Al Terrisio. Al is the president and owner of Ultimate Controls. This is a real guy and a real company, but I'm changing names here. I'm not sure he would want to be the subject of this piece. Please understand, Al's a very nice guy. A good family man. Reliable. Honest.

Frankly, we're getting weary writing about convergence, especially the worst kind where the International Accounting Standards Board and IFRS would replace the Financial Accounting Standards Board and GAAP. We thought we had helped put this issue away for good, but the four firms and the American Institute of CPAs keep pushing, seemingly mesmerized with creating artificial demand for something that is at best a lateral move and at worst a big distraction from the real problems that need to be solved.

Not that kind of expert

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