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Reznick Group said it has signed a letter of intent to acquire another accounting firm, Tidwell DeWitt, building its presence in the Southeast and adding more services.

Business executives see increasing demand for corporate and environmental responsibility programs, and say these programs can actually be profitable, according to a new survey.

Influential accounting profession veteran Mark Tibergien has been named chief executive officer of Pershing Advisor Solutions LLC, an affiliate of Bank of New York Mellon subsidiary Pershing LLC.

With a wave of senior partners graying and a shortage of younger CPA professionals ready to take their place, the importance of creating - and maintaining - a succession plan for a firm's future is becoming more urgent than ever.It may seem obvious to design a plan to keep the business of a firm going strong, but according to a 2006 survey conducted by the Private Companies Practice Section of the American Institute of CPAs and the Texas Society of CPAs' National Management of an Accounting Practice, 76 percent of the 1,842 participating firms reported that they had no documented succession plans.

BDO LOSES MIAMI AUDIT CASE

Although U.S. taxpayers contribute billions of dollars annually to support charitable causes, many of those very same charities are dipping deeper into the pockets of Americans by chiseling on their own taxes, government investigators charged.Auditors at the Government Accountability Office told lawmakers that charities and other tax-exempt organizations are shortchanging the Treasury to the tune of nearly $1 billion by neglecting to make payroll tax payments or pay other taxes required by the government.

My father once told me that during his Army basic training at Fort Dix, N.J., in the early 1950s, his platoon was, on one blistering July day, preparing to embark on a 10-mile hike when his drill sergeant barked out that if there were any plumbers in the barracks who wished to volunteer for a special job, they could sidestep the grueling maneuvers. About four or five hands shot up, and those smirking volunteers were quickly led away to perform their anointed task - cleaning out the clogged latrine pipes.It was at that moment that he gleaned a life-long lesson about volunteering at a time when it seems too good to be true.

I was disappointed in the political tone of the article titled "Experts: Easing middle-class taxes won't help" by Ken Rankin (Accounting Today, July 23-Aug. 5, 2007, page 3).The experts quoted in the article uniformly expressed a right-wing point of view regarding an effort on the part of Democrats to reverse the Bush administration's tax cuts and thereby shift some of the tax burden off the middle class and on to the wealthy. I do not appreciate finding a political article in Accounting Today, particularly if there is no attempt to make the presentation balanced.

Of the roughly one hundred thousand cases a year that go before the Internal Revenue Service Appeals Division, more than 80 percent get resolved without going to litigation. That by itself is a good reason for tax professionals to utilize the appeals process, according to Sarah Ingram, chief at the IRS Appeals unit."We see large taxpayers, small taxpayers, individuals. We see large-dollar figures, any topic under the sun," she said. "Almost half of those cases come from the Collection Division, including either collection due process or offers-in-compromise kinds of activities."

IRS APPOINTS NEW COMMISSIONER