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The American Institute of CPAs presented awards to 10 budding CPAs who achieved the highest cumulative scores last year on the four sections of the Uniform CPA Examination.

If forensic accounting is sexy, litigation support is hot - and CPAs who offer these specialty services are finding their firms' business boiling over into new areas.Being retained by legal counsel to give an expert opinion is at the core of litigation support, a subset of forensic accounting. The two fast-growing niches are very much related, but experts say that forensic accounting is more of an umbrella term that encompasses litigation support.

While the current crop of 2008 presidential candidates continues to stake out positions on the Iraq war, health care and the economy, only a few have shown much interest in a key issue of concern to most tax professionals - reform of the nation's overly cumbersome tax system.

The advantages of application service provider technology are becoming apparent to more tax professionals as the larger players in the field continue to tout its benefits, while smaller entries prepare their own offerings."The most obvious advantage is staffing, and that's an issue that affects both large and small firms alike," said Joanie Mann, executive vice president of online accounting solution provider CPAASP, based in Gig Harbor, Wash. "It makes the transition from tax season to the rest of the year easier, because both expansion and shrinkage can be rapid and efficient."

PCAOB PROPOSES NEW ETHICS RULEWASHINGTON, D.C. - The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has proposed a new ethics rule on communicating with audit committees concerning independence.

"Audit boards, academics to re-assess audit reports" (July 9-22, 2007, page 14) incorrectly identified the university affiliations of five professors running a project for the Auditing Standards Board. The project's two principal investigators are from the University of Southern California and the University of Memphis; the other three professors are from the University of Memphis, the University of Melbourne, and California State University, Northridge. Our apologies for the error.

According to those more experienced in such matters, I'm told the proper gift for a fifth anniversary is wood. To mark my five years of wedded bliss, I asked for a new wood driver. My wife, astutely predicting that such a gift would provide an entrée to spending weekends on the golf course in lieu of sharing domestic duties, instead bought me a hand-carved in/out box.The financial community recently marked a five-year anniversary, although not everyone was rushing out to locate the gift register. It's been five years since the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was signed into law, and exactly what type of wood gift one would purchase to celebrate that milestone depends largely, I would assume, on the giver.

PHILIP L. DEFLIESEI first met Phil Defliese at a dinner meeting sponsored by the City College Fund. He was good looking with curly dark hair, and as each of us identified himself, Phil said, "I am Philip Defliese of Lybrand, Ross Bros. & Montgomery."

Congress hopes to partially remedy the tax gap by making tax preparers more responsible for the positions their clients take on returns.Because paid preparers prepare over 62 percent of all individual income tax returns, they are a critical quality control for tax administration by helping to prevent noncompliance, according to an April report released by the Government Accountability Office.

IRS SIMPLIFIES E-SIGNATURESWASHINGTON, D.C. - The Internal Revenue Service said that it plans to simplify the signature process for electronically filed individual tax returns by allowing tax practitioners to avoid the need to send a paper signature document in support of their clients' e-filed returns.