Practice Management

Love was in the air at this year's Association for Accounting Marketing Summit in Chicago.

As if running a CPA firm didn't pose enough wrenching decisions for owners and managing partners on an almost daily basis, selecting a suitable framework for expansion has traditionally added to the litany of leadership headaches.

In March of this year, we devoted this column to the Internal Revenue Service's newly announced 2011 Offshore Voluntary Disclosure Initiative for disclosing income from foreign accounts and assets. Key features of the program are an Aug. 31, 2011, deadline, an eight-year disclosure period, a maximum 25 percent penalty for failure to disclose, reduced 12.5 or 5 percent penalties in specified situations, and various documentation and disclosures required with the submission.

Sometimes I drive by a strip mall and I see it's under construction and getting a facelift. Off come the signs written in that 1960s-style cursive and on come new signs with updated colors and symbols that don't seem to mean anything but must be conveying a subliminal message, because those chain stores paid a designer a boatload of cash to create it.

Not all complex problems require a complex solution, and a more elaborate solution doesn't automatically make it a better one. Bigger and faster is simply bigger and faster; it's not better.

Sam Levy gave a lot of thought to the name of the accounting firm he launched late last year. He didn't like "Levy & Co.," and "Levy & Associates" was already taken. His choice eventually came down to "Levy Tax & Consulting" or "Levy Tax & Advisory Services," and he picked the former.

While Congress debates the debt ceiling and spending cuts, government contractors and entities - and the accounting firms that serve them - are functioning under an increasing regulatory environment that's testing some of their business fundamentals.

JACKSON HEWITT FILES CH. 11

Washington, D.C. - The Internal Revenue Service said in mid-June that approximately 275,000 organizations have automatically lost their tax-exempt status under the law because they did not file legally required annual reports for three consecutive years.

Meet the new IRS—the kinder, gentler IRS. It's an agency with processes that are fast becoming structured, streamlined—and strangely quiet.