Finance

Governmental Accounting Standards Board chairman David Vaudt talks about his plans as GASB's new leader and the board's agenda for pension standards, post-employment benefits in the retiree health care area, and the need to provide useful information for elected officials and government policymakers, in an interview with Accounting Today editor-in-chief Daniel Hood.

The House passed a bill to prohibit the Internal Revenue Service from implementing or enforcing the Affordable Care Act before heading home for Congress’s August recess, but the legislation has little chance of advancing in the Senate.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa sent a subpoena for Internal Revenue Service documents to the Treasury Secretary, saying he thinks the agency’s chief counsel’s office is “compromised.”

The U.S. tax systems for individuals and corporations should be revamped together, said the top Republican tax writer in Congress, resisting President Barack Obama’s call for a business-only approach.

Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 162,000 in July, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday, sending the unemployment rate down by two-tenths of a percentage point to 7.4 percent, although many of the gains were in low-wage jobs.

Tax reform talk is heating up. Support is growing for bipartisan efforts to rewrite the tax code, with committee chairmen and ranking members in both the House and the Senate jumping aboard the effort.

A bipartisan group of senators have introduced legislation to combat acts of tax evasion, money laundering, terrorism and other wrongdoing facilitated by U.S. corporations with hidden owners.

The American Institute of CPAs has sent a letter to the Senate Finance Committee recapping its recommendations on tax reform as the committee moves closer to drafting a tax reform bill.

It is time that all governments started keeping their books using the same accounting system that for-profit businesses use.

Congress gave final approval to legislation that would peg the interest rates on government-sponsored student loans to a market-based rate, ensuring that almost 9 million undergraduates will pay 3.86 percent interest on their next loan.

Self-described conservative and Tea Party groups seeking tax-exempt status were asked more questions by the Internal Revenue Service and had longer delays than progressive organizations, according to an analysis by the House Ways and Means Committee.

President Barack Obama, prodding Congress to consider fresh economic proposals after two years of gridlock, called for restructuring business taxes so long as the initial revenue generated goes toward job creation.

The leaders of Congress’s two main tax committees continued their tax reform road show tour with a stop at a New Jersey small business that makes kitchen appliances.

David A. Vaudt, the new chairman of the Governmental Accounting Standards Board, plans to closely monitor the impact of GASB’s new pension accounting standards on the finances of state and local governments.

There’s a tie that binds the Securities and Exchange Commission’s separate probes of SAC Capital Advisors LP founder Steven A. Cohen and Fabrice Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. vice president.

About 11 million U.S. students who need to borrow to cover their college costs would pay 3.86 percent on their next loans under legislation now headed for final passage by Congress.

Senators Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, and Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, led a bipartisan group of five senators in introducing legislation to increase the alternative tax liability limitation for small property and casualty insurance companies.

The deadline is coming up this week for lawmakers in Congress to submit their preferences for the “must have” tax breaks that need to be kept in the Tax Code under Senate Finance Committee leaders’ “blank slate” approach to tax reform.

Last month’s Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Windsor held section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act to be unconstitutional.

The chairmen of the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee have written to the head of the Internal Revenue Service about the status of several of the officials who resigned or were placed on administrative leave in the wake of the Tea Party targeting scandal.