Virchow Krause expands in Detroit
Virchow, Krause & Co. LLP announced a merger with Farmington Hills, Mich.-based Kleiman, Carney & Greenbaum.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
After merging with Zalenko & Associates in January 2005, VK chief executive Tim Christen said that his firm's goal was to have more than 200 employees in Detroit by 2007. With the Kleiman Carney acquisition, Virchow Krause will have a total of 170 staff in the greater Detroit area, after entering the market in November 2003. They will add $7.5 million in revenue and 53 professional staff, including eight partners.
As of June 1, the firms will complete the merger by combining all three Detroit offices into a prominent new location in Southfield, Mich. Virchow Krause will gain greater visibility by placing its name atop a 19-story building, where it will occupy two floors and approximately 50,000 square feet of space.
Virchow Krause ranked No. 17 on Accounting Today's 2006 list of Top 100 Firms, with revenues of $150 million.
TRAC gets data, thanks to judge
A federal judge upheld a 1976 ruling and ordered the Internal Revenue Service to release detailed statistics on how the agency enforces the nation's tax laws to Susan Long, a Syracuse University professor and co-director of a nonprofit research group, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
Long filed a motion in January, saying that, after nearly 30 years, the IRS had stopped disclosing information on its audit, collection and other enforcement activities in mid-2004.
Judge Marsha Pechman of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington said that the 1976 case still remains enforceable, and that the IRS's claims that producing the data would be burdensome were unsupported. The court also rejected the IRS's argument that producing statistical data would violate a statute prohibiting public release of tax return information about individual taxpayers.
NAACP to challenge IRS in court
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People announced that it is taking measures to challenge the Internal Revenue Service's examination of the association's tax-exempt status.
In February, the IRS released a report on the agency's examination of political activity by tax-exempt organizations during the last major election. In connection with the report, the agency also unveiled new guidance for the 2006 election season. According to the NAACP, the IRS threatened to revoke its tax-exempt status because its chairman, Julian Bond, criticized the Bush administration's policies in a 2004 speech.
The association's general counsel said that although the agency has not contacted the NAACP in more than a year, the group was alarmed by the IRS's new guidance, adding that the NAACP had filed a claim for a refund of $17.65, and that if the IRS failed to respond to the request within six months, the group will seek review of the refund claim in federal court.
Ex-KPMGers settle in Tenet scandal
Three former KPMG auditors settled charges of improper professional conduct for failing to properly complete the audit of Tenet Healthcare Corp.'s 2002 financial statements and then making changes to try and conceal their work.
The three men neither admitted nor denied the findings of the Securities and Exchange Commission. All three will not be allowed to work with public companies as accountants, though two may apply for reinstatement in the future.
In October 2002, an analyst reported that Dallas-based Tenet had been exploiting the Medicare program, causing the company's market capitalization to drop by more than $11 billion. A month later, the SEC said that the Tenet audit team began altering the audit's working papers to create the false impression that the audit was complete when the report was issued.
