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Even though some say that tax season never ends, the summer is traditionally the time when software manufacturers offer tryouts, early renewals and promotional pricing, and when practitioners have the opportunity to try something new.

As if running a CPA firm didn't pose enough wrenching decisions for owners and managing partners on an almost daily basis, selecting a suitable framework for expansion has traditionally added to the litany of leadership headaches.

Accountants today face much more risk today than they did even five years ago.

The often-polarizing subject of tax reform has inarguably taken more than its share of space on this page over the years, as well as in Accounting Today as a whole. We've chronicled the overlong and futile efforts of President George W. Bush's 2005 Advisory Panel on Federal Tax Reform, in addition to the more recent efforts under the Obama administration's President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

In March of this year, we devoted this column to the Internal Revenue Service's newly announced 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative for disclosing income from foreign accounts and assets. Key features of the program are an Aug. 31, 2011, deadline, an eight-year disclosure period, a maximum 25 percent penalty for failure to disclose, reduced 12.5 or 5 percent penalties in specified situations, and various documentation and disclosures required with the submission.

With a combination of vindication, irony, frustration and encouragement, we read the American Institute of CPAs' reply (May 2011, page 16) to our March column ("IFRS non-vergence," page 19), in which we called the institute's management to account for relentlessly pursuing the losing side on the issue of whether U.S. GAAP should be replaced by IFRS.

CALIFORNIA

Sometimes I drive by a strip mall and I see it's under construction and getting a facelift. Off come the signs written in that 1960s-style cursive and on come new signs with updated colors and symbols that don't seem to mean anything but must be conveying a subliminal message, because those chain stores paid a designer a boatload of cash to create it.

This column was almost ready to submit when the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board announced that they changed some tentative decisions concerning lease accounting. Before the announcement, we identified six unproductive positions. That list has now been reduced to four-and-a-half, leaving most of our criticisms unchanged, but at least now we have a glimmer of hope that they will produce a better standard.

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