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After learning that more than 450,000 federal workers and retirees owe a whopping $3 billion in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, the Senate Finance Committee is urging the president to step up efforts to collect from those delinquent employees.Senate Finance Committee chair Max Baucus, D-Mont., and ranking Republican member Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, sent a letter to President Bush requesting that he remind the delinquent federal employees and warn them of the consequences of non-compliance.

Tax practitioners looking to Congress, the Treasury or the Patent Office for a solution to the perceived problem of tax strategy patents may instead have found some assistance from an expected source - the Supreme Court.A unanimous Supreme Court, in the case of KSR v. Teleflex, decided on April 30, 2007, overturned a decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and found a patent claim invalid. In doing so, the high court also criticized the Federal Circuit for applying the wrong standard on patent claims and being too liberal in upholding patent claims for obvious improvements.

When Deborah F. Kretchmar, audit director of Horace Mann Cos., flipped through the introduction of Four Approaches to Enterprise Risk Management ... and Opportunities in Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance, she knew she had to have it."I bought the book because my company is looking at enterprise risk management and thinking about developing a more formal process for it," Kretchmar said. "We have informal processes, but S&P and Moody's are very interested in seeing us move toward a more formal process that they can place more reliance on."

TECUMSEH PRODUCTS JETTISONS PRICEWATERHOUSECOOPERSTecumseh Products Co., a manufacturer of electronic motors and compressors, has dismissed its auditor, Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, and named Grant Thornton as its new independent accountant. No reason was given for the change in auditors in a federal filing. Tecumseh said that it did not have any disagreements with PwC on financial statement disclosure, accounting principles or audits.

The fact that there has been no Baby Boomer "bust" has been due in large part to the skill of retirement planners, accountants and their clients.The bust was supposed to occur as Boomers began reaching retirement age without having saved enough to retire. This, coupled with the dismantling of the retirement and pension programs at a host of corporations nationwide, could have created the most poverty-stricken generation of retirees since the Great Depression.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards said that after more than 20 years in Denver, the organization plans to relocate its headquarters to Washington, D.C. CFP Board chair Karen Schaeffer said, "The financial planning profession and the people it serves are being significantly impacted by public policy developments and trends in the financial sector that can best be monitored, influenced and managed from our nation's capital."The board expects to complete the move over the next few months.

Although couples generally agree on which retirement products they own, they often differ on their plans and expectations for retirement, according to research conducted by Fidelity Investments.Fidelity polled couples born between 1937 and 1964. When asked which income sources they would rely on most in retirement, most couples agreed that workplace savings plans, pensions and Social Security would top the list, but only 39 percent agreed upon which potential sources would be their primary source of income.

Former Senator Paul Sarbanes, D-Md., who, as the head of the Senate Banking Committee, co-authored the sweeping Sarbanes-Oxley Act, said that he supports developing additional guidance for smaller filers but, not surprisingly, he dismisses exempting those companies from compliance with the law's rigid Section 404."Stop and think about that for a moment," Sarbanes said in a speech before attendees at a conference on contemporary accounting issues. "That would mean that you would be exempting 80 percent of public companies from compliance."

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, has sent a letter to his chamber colleagues in an attempt to blunt what he termed "inaccurate claims" about the private collectors employed by the Internal Revenue Service.In a "Dear Colleague" letter, Grassley pointed out that the agency's own collection infrastructure is better set up for placing liens and garnishing wages than it is for making initial phone calls to delinquent taxpayers to set up a payment plan.

Years ago, write-up software was fairly rare, and the market was dominated by trial balance applications. Over the years, as software applications have become more sophisticated, the distribution has switched, with write-up becoming predominant. While not as popular as it was in the past, software specifically designed for trial balance use is still available, and still selling very nicely.While the two applications are somewhat similar, they are far from identical. Nor is trial balance a subset of write-up. Sure, you enter financial data into either of them, and both can produce financial statements, but that's pretty much where the similarities end.