Financial Planning

President Obama introduced a new retirement savings vehicle that he called a “MyRA” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening, and the White House has followed up with more details on Wednesday about it.

While President Obama mentioned taxes a number of times in his State of the Union speech last night, the details were scant.

The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department have brought civil and criminal charges against a Chicago accountant who used his wife’s trading account to short-sell shares in the health care information company where he was director of internal audit ahead of the public release of the company’s financial results, earning more than a quarter-million dollars in profits.

President Barack Obama proposed a series of actions to deal with economic issues ranging from the minimum wage to tax reform and student loan debt during his State of the Union address on Tuesday evening.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued new rules providing an automatic extension of time for certain estates without a filing requirement to elect portability of the decedent’s unused exclusion amount for the benefit of the decedent’s surviving spouse.

The Internal Revenue Service has posted a final version of the form for computing the 3.8 percent Net Investment Income Tax that was mandated as part of the Affordable Care Act.

The U.S. Departments of Treasury and Education are partnering with accounting and tax software developer Intuit to raise awareness of income-driven repayment plans and other repayment options for federal student loan borrowers.

Despite a wave of accounting scandals at Chinese companies, a 58 percent majority of capital markets executives at investment banks believe the number of U.S. IPOs from China-based businesses will increase in 2014, according to a new survey by the accounting and consulting firm BDO USA LLP.

The American Institute of CPAs has issued additional guidance for CPAs who offer personal financial planning services, issuing practice standards that apply the AICPA's code of professional conduct to the PFP arena.

The Internal Revenue Service has released a set of proposed regulations to prevent abuses of the partnership basis adjustment rules, disallowing partnership loss transfers to avoid some of the abuses uncovered by the Enron scandal.