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In a classic marx brothers scene from A Night at the Opera, Groucho is dining at a high-end establishment with Margaret Dumont, the heavyset woman who was frequently at the wrong end of his constant barbs. When the waiter brings the check, Groucho scans it with his eyebrows in full motion before shouting, “Nine dollars and 40 cents? This is an outrage.” He then hands it to Dumont and quips, “If I were you, I wouldn’t pay it.”Lately, I’m feeling a bit like Ms. Dumont — the gnawing uncertainty that comes when anticipating the bill in an expensive restaurant.

This writer has seldom witnessed so meteoric an ascent to fame as that of James Needham, first to the Securities and Exchange Commission and then as chairman of the New York Stock Exchange.Jim was a pleasant, always-smiling CPA with an Irish mien and personality. In many ways, our careers paralleled each other as we moved up the ladder of the New York State Society and the American Institute of CPAs. In 1969, there was an opening on the Securities and Exchange Commission and the then-Secretary of Commerce, Maurice Stans, a past president of the AICPA, recommended that a CPA be appointed. Republican politics ordained that the post go to a designee in North Carolina. The firm of A.M. Pullen in Greensboro, N.C., was contacted and it recommended James Needham, who was managing partner of its New York office.

IRS REDUCES BIZ TAX EXTENSIONSWashington, D.C. — The Internal Revenue Service has moved up the extended due date for partnership, estate and trust tax returns from Oct. 15 to Sept. 15 to avoid overlapping with the extended deadline for individual taxes.

Real estate mortgage schemes, foreclosure activities, equity stripping and fraud are booming. Individuals mastermind multi-tiered structures designed to hide participants or obfuscate relationships. They often have intentionally incomplete or poor financial records. These cases ordinarily involve desperate or opportunistic actions by very bright individuals, all connected by ambiguous documentation and well-hidden trails. As a result, the research, discovery, assessments, valuations and case preparation can become extremely complex.With the advancement of technology, new avenues for fraud, criminal behavior and outright negligence are surfacing. Now e-mail, cell phones and electronic monitoring systems provide volumes of information that can be used to discover the “smoking gun” in fraud cases. Using this electronic data and other hard-copy archives, the forensic investigation team, working closely with case attorneys and clients, sift through enormous volumes of documents to identify the possibility of fraud, financial reporting negligence, “cooked books” or other potential corruption.

PARKWAY PROPERTIES DISMISSES E&YParkway Properties Inc., a Jackson, Miss.-based real estate investment trust, dismissed auditor Ernst & Young LLP and engaged KPMG as its new independent accountant.

Will health issues force your clients to retire earlier or spend their nest eggs quicker than they planned?Four in 10 Americans retire sooner than they expected. Of those, 40 percent do so because of health issues or disability, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.

HOUSE CONSIDERS MANDATING EMPLOYER IRA PLANSThe House Ways and Means Select Revenue Measures Subcommittee held hearings on bills that would encourage employers to automatically enroll their employees in individual retirement account plans. One bill is aimed at creating automatic payroll deposit IRAs for workers who do not have access to employer-sponsored pension plans.

Prior to co-founding Adaptive Planning, a company that offers Web-based business intelligence software, Robert Hull described himself as a “frustrated” chief financial officer — and the chief culprit behind that frustration was Excel.“I was not happy continuing to use Excel as my budgeting, forecasting and reporting application, but was also a bit hampered by the resources needed to get to essentially the enterprise class of planning applications,” Hull recalled. “As I looked out at the marketplace, what I saw was a pretty big hole with respect to a mid-market application that was affordable, didn’t require a lot of resources to get going and actually solved my business problem in a non-technical way.”

SAGE RELEASES TIMESLIPS 2009Sage Software has released Timeslips by Sage 2009, an enhanced version of its time and billing application that includes a number of new features and improvements. These include streamlined billing, with customizable buttons that activate user-defined billing procedures; new reporting; and a new timekeeper report that enables businesses to track work in process, billed time, paid bills and write-offs for each timekeeper. Timeslips 2009 also offers the option to auto-fill transactions with a client’s current balance, automatically run conflict-of-interest checks during the client-entry process, and the ability to hide inactive references.

Ten years ago, not many would believe that e-mail would eventually become a mission-critical application. Yet today it has taken over many work lives and is gaining an even firmer grip as PDAs, BlackBerries and other mobile devices become widespread.Sadly, most users have little, if any, training in how to effectively organize and follow through with the mass of messages that they receive each day. Little or no planning goes into personal implementation.