Audit & Accounting

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."

My show business career was, to be kind, unremarkable.

Feeble audit procedures are allowing tax cheats to evade billions of dollars in U.S. tax liabilities each year by hiding funds in offshore accounts, government investigators told Congress.

Moving forward with plans to converge U.S. generally accepted accounting principles with international financial reporting standards, the Financial Accounting Standards Board expects to crank out a host of related proposals in the second half of 2007.Even as the Securities and Exchange Commission proceeds to explore the possibility of allowing foreign companies to use financial reports prepared under IFRS to list on U.S. capital markets, FASB and the International Accounting Standards Board are working together to produce standards that are identical or very similar.

Nexus - the amount of contact between a taxpayer and the state that subjects the taxpayer to taxation - continues to vary widely from state to state. In addition, the nexus for sales and use tax differs from the nexus for income tax.The nexus requirement is derived from the language in two different places in the Constitution - the commerce clause, which prohibits states from unduly burdening interstate commerce, and the due process clause, which requires a minimum connection between a state and an entity it seeks to tax.

Our last column dug into some of the reporting practices used by Hertz Global, specifically its somewhat misleading depreciation of its rental fleet.We noted that Hertz reported the fleet in the 2006 10-K as a long-term asset, showing full cost less accumulated depreciation. It also showed depreciation as an add-back to net income in the operating section of the cash-flow statement. To provide a scale, out of $18.7 billion total assets, the fleet's book value at the end of 2006 was about $7.4 billion, or 40 percent. On the cash-flow statement, the reported operating flow for 2006 was about $2.6 billion, after adding back $1.8 billion of depreciation.

CCH has released a white paper on the recent regulatory guidance from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board concerning the internal control provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Taking over the helm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu today, chief executive James Quigley and a new leadership team announced their plans to become the largest professional services network within the next two years.Quigley plans to bring a new focus on the Deloitte brand, as well as to build a stronger commitment to the firm’s people. He also wants to strengthen the connection between Deloitte member firms across regions, increase the number of professionals in key markets in Europe and Asia, and showcase the firms’ consulting capabilities as a market differentiator.