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Carbis Walker LLP, a firm specializing in public accounting and consulting, is offering manufacturers and distributors the opportunity to participate in a national benchmarking survey through a partnership with McGladrey & Pullen LLP.

Jayne V. Bates is in the home stretch of her one-year term as president of the Association for Accounting Marketing, which will end in July. Bates has served on the association’s board of directors since January 2001.Herself a CPA, Bates is currently the director of marketing for Carter, Belcourt & Atkinson PA CPAs, a firm based in Lakeland and Tampa, Fla. She has been with CBA for nearly 20 years, spending her first eight years with the firm as a professional staff accountant and serving in a marketing capacity during the rest of her tenure.

When Matt Camden, chief information officer at UHY Advisors in Chicago, faced an audit server outage in one of his New England offices over a February weekend, he was able to restore his data in a period of 11 hours."Two of our disks failed, which is a terrible thing to happen," Camden recalled. "All we had to do is put new server hardware in place, which is our responsibility, then we got the data back up, loaded it, and it worked like a charm." He credited his online data protection company, EVault, for the rapid restoration process.

CLIFTON GUNDERSON ABSORBS NEW MEXICO FIRMPEORIA, ILL. - Midwestern regional firm Clifton Gunderson has acquired Chavarria Dunne & Lamey LLC of Albuquerque, N.M.

The first time I came into contact with a chamber of commerce was to research a high school project on the rapid growth of business parks around my hometown on Long Island. The office agreed to let me speak to one of the associate directors, but I was limited to 10 minutes, as they implied their office had actual business to attend to, and it didn't entail patiently answering a 17-year-old's questions about the benefits of erecting scores of look-alike business centers on what were then relatively undeveloped tracts of land.I received boilerplate answers to most of my inquiries, but their position was, as best I can recall, that they welcomed all business that would serve to benefit the surrounding communities.

As it stands now, CPAs must often register or pay a fee when practicing in a state in which they are not licensed and have no office or intention to open one. This is true even if the CPA's business is being conducted over the Internet, by phone or via mail service, and the CPA never physically enters the other state. A CPA may also face registration and fee requirements for simply preparing a tax return for a client with an investment in a business in another state.To many CPAs, this restraint on mobility does not seem fair. Hasn't every licensed CPA completed roughly the same educational and experience requirements and taken the same Uniform CPA Exam? Isn't every licensed CPA subject to similar continuing professional education requirements?

A RARE CONSENSUSIt surprised me, but for once I don't disagree with columnists Miller & Bahnson! Their article on purchase accounting (Feb. 26-March 18, 2007, page 12) is correct. Coming up with the fair value for the seller's assets and leaving the buyer's assets at historical cost provides only a mish-mash on the new combined balance sheet. Thus, their recommendations for "real basis" accounting, putting both buyer and seller on a full fair value basis, is theoretically sound. Also, it is actually possible to implement. If we can apply SFAS 141 to the seller, there is absolutely no reason why we cannot also apply it to the buyer at the time of a business combination.

IRS REVISES OFFER IN COMPROMISE APPLICATIONWASHINGTON - The Internal Revenue Service announced that its revised taxpayer application for an offer in compromise, Form 656, is now available. The Form 656 package was last revised in 2004 to help taxpayers prepare an offer correctly and completely.

Strategies for the use of tax-deferred like-kind exchanges have grown over the years from almost exclusively a real estate concern to one in which billions of dollars of business tangible personal property are traded each year. While the main battle continues to be waged over what dissimilarities in property are allowed and still qualify as "like kind," another fight has developed over how the property received in a like-kind exchange is to be depreciated.After tinkering with the depreciation rules in 2001 and 2004, the Treasury issued final regulations early in 2007. In its preamble to the final regs, the Treasury admitted that confusion and resulting inconsistency among taxpayers had developed. The final regs appear to do little to end those problems.

It figures that it would be Tom Allen who took on the single biggest accounting issue in the country, if not the world.It was Allen who, as chairman of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, ushered in Statement 34, which moved state and local governments to accrual accounting - arguably one of the biggest changes ever to impact governmental accounting.