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Internal Revenue Service chief counsel Donald L. Korb has named Stephen Kesselman to become deputy chief counsel, operations, succeeding IRS veteran Donald T. Rocen. Kesselman is currently serving as counsel in the IRS' Small Business/Self-Employed Division. Rocen, who has held a number of posts in the Office of the Chief Counsel for 15 years, will leave the service July 27 for the Washington law firm of Miller & Chevalier. Lon B. Smith, associate chief counsel of financial products and institutions, will now become national counsel to the chief counsel for special projects. He has served in the Office of Chief Counsel for 30 years.

Sage Software has released the latest version of its billing application, Timeslips by Sage 2008. The new offering allows greater capability for determining when clients should be billed based on billing criteria set up by users. For example, Timeslips can be set up to create bills for clients who have not been billed in 30 days, when they hit an established billing limit, or other user-defined billing scenarios. New user-defined accounts receivable and funds reports allow businesses to create customized summary and itemized reports within Timeslips. The ability to create AR or funds reports in Timeslips eliminates the need to export data into Microsoft Excel and encourages a more efficient collection process, the company said. "There were a lot of improvements and enhancements to our existing features. What we did is really give them the ability to build their type of reports by summary or itemized information," product marketing manager Shannon Lindner told WebCPA. Lindner explained that the enhancements were based on customer feedback. Lindner said this new version allows users to view multiple customers on the program's main screen, instead of just one customer as offered in the previous version. Users will also be able to skip a step when printing out their labels and envelopes. With the new version, once users print out their bills, the corresponding labels and envelopes will be printed out as well. "We gave them the capability of automating the process," Lindner said. For more information call (800)-285-0999 or visit www.timeslips.com.

In an effort to increase diversity in the financial services industry, the House Financial Services Committee has passed H. Con. Res.140, the Financial Services Diversity Initiative. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, D-N.Y., specifically will: * Encourage financial institutions to promote workforce diversity, including partnering with organizations that focus on developing opportunities for minorities and women; placing youth in internships, summer jobs and full-time positions within the industry; and partnering with inner-city high schools and girls' high schools to establish financial literacy programs and provide mentoring. * Encourage financial institutions and federal and state financial institutions' agencies to attract and retain a diverse workforce by recruiting at women's colleges and colleges that serve minority groups; sponsoring and recruiting at job fairs in urban communities; and placing employment ads in media outlets oriented to people of color; and, * Require that active measures should be taken by employers and educational institutions to increase the demographic diversity of the financial services industry. Meeks cited a Government Accountability Office report on diversity within the financial services industry that said that "representation for minorities in the financial services industry still lagged behind reasonable numbers on all levels and for women in upper management levels exclusively."

Chief financial officers are divided on their views of the Securities and Exchange Commission's proposed change to allow foreign issuers to choose between reporting in International Financial Reporting Standards or U.S. GAAP. Some 55 percent of CFOs polled in the quarterly "CFO Outlook Survey," conducted jointly by Financial Executives International and Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, supported the change, while 50 percent supported a proposal to allow U.S. filers to choose between IFRS or GAAP. "The globalization of the capital markets demands that we create a dialogue about the virtues of GAAP and IFRS," said Michael P. Cangemi, FEI president and chief executive. "At this point, U.S. financial executives need to become more familiar with IFRS. It will at some future point have an impact on how financial statements are prepared." Meanwhile, CFOs are forecasting just single-digit increases in capital spending, hiring, and the prices of their products over the next 12 months, according to the poll. The weighted expected increases for the next year averaged 2.3 percent for capital spending, 4.1 percent for hiring, and 1.9 percent for product prices. By contrast, the CFO Survey for the first quarter projected averages of 7.9 percent, 5.2 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively. The only area that saw an increase from the last quarter was technology spending, which rose from 9.6 percent to 11.3 percent.

Technology will be even more critical to the success of small businesses in 10 years, according to a study sponsored by business and financial management software provider Intuit. The second installment of the "Intuit Future of Small Business Report," authored by the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, focused on how technology will propel and transform small businesses by identifying three trends: small business management will increasingly be "on my time" and "on my terms" for owners; the evolution of the Web will fuel small-business formation, operations and innovation; and the small-business marketing approach will shift from "push" to "pull," with emphasis on providing customers and prospects with the information they need, when they need it. The first installment, released in January, explored the changing face of entrepreneurship, the rise of personal businesses and the emergence of entrepreneurship education. Small businesses are defined by Intuit as those with fewer than 500 employees, according to Steven Aldrich, vice president of strategy and innovation for Intuit's small business division. "There were a few surprises in terms of how fast these technology changes are impacting small business," Aldrich said. "First the rapid lowering of cost in technology, in general, and the ease of use that increasing in that technology is spurring lots of adoption, much more quickly than we had seen in the past. The second one [is] the rapid change of consumers' use of the Internet is confusing small businesses to an extent that I had not expected. They are not sure how to keep up with the way their customers are using the Internet." Being digitally connected will allow small business owners to run their firms on their own terms, and, according to the report, intelligent devices -- equipped with computing, storage and sensing abilities -- will be used more to improve the delivery of goods and services, while freeing business owners from mundane tasks. More business owners will use mobile devices and an emergence of analytic tools will increase productivity and ease management burdens, the report predicted. The high cost and complexity of technology will decrease, leading to an expansion of new business applications. The report found that small business relationships will become more virtual, and social networking will become commonplace, allowing business owners to connect with customers, partners and suppliers globally. The report also stresses that a small business' online presence is the most important factor in gaining new customers. In the last five years, according to Aldrich, consumers' use of searching the Yellow Pages for goods and services has decreased by 50 percent; instead, they are going online first to conduct research. The third installment, to be released later this year, will examine how small businesses will affect society and the economy through 2017.

In Congress’ first hearing on health care reform since the mid-1990s, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. unveiled his plan of a universal health care system before the Senate Budget Committee.

Imagine that every time you began to drive your car, you received a 50-page printed report. It would give information on the characteristics of the gasoline, the place of origin, its evaporation point, the price paid for the gas this year versus the price paid last year, political influences on petroleum prices, and the percentage of the auto’s operating costs represented by fuel. That would be the start. But what the driver really wants to know is how much gasoline is in the tank and how far the car can get on that amount. And, if there were some nifty link between the gas tank and a GPS system, there should be a trigger that would bring up directions to the nearest gas stations once the fuel level dropped to a critical point. Reports from software systems are a lot like this—There’s all sorts of detail when all the user wants to know is how much gasoline is in the tank. The other problem is that the report is usually delivered after the car is out of gas. Users want to know when things are going wrong and how they can make things work better. Talking to practitioners about workflow software repeatedly brought up the point that they would like dashboards that enable them to know the status of returns, and who has them. Executives everywhere want reporting by exception, not stacks of reports, so that they can make corrections before things go wrong. It’s like the warning a car gives when the gas levels drop, usually to about one-eighth of a tank. Easier said than done, of course, because it takes more sophisticated systems to get finer control over an operation than it does to generate reams of small print. And that’s why the history of computing, until recently, has been about killing trees. The need for conserving the environment aside, simpler, more understandable reports in real time is what business needs—unless you just like reading reports. Or don’t like trees.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox has established an advisory committee to help make financial reporting more "user-friendly." The SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting will examine the U.S. financial reporting system in an effort to reduce complexity, make financial reports clearer to investors reduce costs for preparers and determine how to better capitalize on the use of technology. "Our current system of financial reporting has become unnecessarily complex for investors, companies, and the markets generally," Cox said. "The time is ripe to review how that system can be made less complex and more useful to investors." Robert C. Pozen, chairman of MFS Investment Management in Boston and former vice chairman of Fidelity Investments, was appointed the committee chair. Cox said he expects between 13 and 17 additional members with varied backgrounds to be named to the advisory committee within the next few weeks.Some of the areas the committee will focus on include: * The current approach to setting financial accounting and reporting standards; * The current process of regulating compliance by registrants and financial professionals with accounting and reporting standards; and * The current systems for delivering financial information to investors and accessing that information. Both the Financial Accounting Standards Board and Financial Executives International lauded the development. "This advisory committee represents an important step toward addressing the institutional, structural, cultural, and behavioral issues that create complexity, reduce transparency, and impede usefulness of reported information to investors," said FASB chairman Robert Herz. Meanwhile the 15,000-member FEI said that it "applauds the SEC's announcement today regarding the formation of an SEC Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting. We reiterate our belief that the current complexity in accounting and reporting harms the ability of users of financial statements to understand the information provided and impairs the ability of preparers to explain their financial results in a meaningful way."

The Internal Revenue Service ruled that a partial termination of a qualified plan occurred where 23 percent of a plan's participants were no longer active due to the closing of one of the employer's four locations. Therefore, all plan participants were fully vested. Under Code Section 411(d)(3), a plan is required to provide that, upon its partial termination, the rights of all affected employees to benefits up to the date of the termination must be non-forfeitable. Under the regs, the IRS uses a facts and circumstances test to determine whether a partial termination has occurred. The IRS ruled that if the turnover rate is 20 percent or more, there is a presumption that a partial termination of the plan has occurred. The IRS determined the turnover rate by dividing the number of participating employees who had an employer-initiated severance from employment during the applicable period - in this case, the plan year - by the sum of all of the participating employees at the start of the applicable period and the employees who became participants during the applicable period. The 20 percent threshold merely creates a presumption, according to the IRS. Facts and circumstances indicating that the turnover rate for an applicable period is routine, and not the result of a shutdown as in this instance, favor a finding that there is no partial termination. The IRS also noted that a partial termination of a qualified plan can also occur for reasons other than turnover. For instance, a partial termination can occur due to plan amendments that adversely affect the rights of employees to vest in benefits under the plan, plan amendments that exclude a group of employees who have previously been covered by the plan, or the reduction or cessation of future benefit accruals resulting in a potential reversion to the employer.

Regional CPA and business advisory firm Weiser LLP has merged in the Clark, N.J.-based practice of Cohen Friedman Dorman Leen & Co., effective immediately. Terms were not disclosed. The union will add six partners, including CFDL managing partner Howard Dorman, to Weiser. The firm has relocated from its Clark facility to Weiser's offices in Edison. Going forward, the firm will operate under the Weiser brand. The 30-plus year-old CFDL specializes in such areas as audit, tax, elder care planning, benefit plans, insurance review, and IT consulting and implementation. Weiser is ranked No. 20 on Accounting Today's 2007 Top 100 Firms roster with revenues of $110 million.