CPA Now Blog Archive

CPAs volunteer for many different causes in their communities and love doing it. This year Jerry Maginnis, PICPA president, wants to shine a light on all these volunteer activities.

Affordable Care Act provisions will debut on your tax return for the first time this year. You will have to deal with it in some form, but for most people, the good news is all that’s involved on the tax side is a check mark.

The variety of CPA job options and the opportunity to make good money have always been a part of the message because most students have been receptive and interested in those points. More recently, though, there has been a shift to also convey the higher purpose of an accounting career as we work to appeal to the millennial generation and the one behind it.

I always think of September as the beginning of the PICPA year. Everyone seems refocused after enjoying some vacation during the lazy, hazy days of summer, and calendars start to tighten up.

You simply cannot apply a standard commercial audit approach to the audit of a not-for-profit and expect a good fit. Auditors must adjust and hone the audit approach in order to fit the not-for-profit entity.

State lawmakers reconvene in Harrisburg today, Monday, Sept. 15, for the abbreviated fall legislative session. Senators are scheduled to be in session for 10 days, while their colleagues in the House have 11 days on their calendar.

As financial planning begins its transition into the digital age, the tools we use to deliver financial planning will change. Increasing use of account aggregation platforms by consumers means that clients will come to the first meeting with their financial lives already detailed. This allows planners to develop an electronic plan that will provide clients with actionable steps and recommendations.

LinkedIn is, by far, the most popular social media platform used by business valuation and forensic litigation services (BVFLS) practitioners. But that does not mean that everyone on LinkedIn is doing it well, and using social media poorly is could be worse than not doing it all.

The Microsoft Office suite– including Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint – offer a seemingly endless array of features to assist busy professionals with their daily responsibilities.

In President Obama’s press conference on Aug. 7, 2014, he blamed the wave of corporate inversions to escape the 35 percent statutory corporate federal tax rate on accountants. The president’s statement is off the mark. It was Congress, not accountants, that enacted the incredibly complex international tax regime in the first place.

The Pennsylvania Department of Revenue’s (DOR) decision to unilaterally deny taxpayers’ legitimate unreimbursed business expense (UE) deductions has set off a firestorm of criticism.

The seven Cs are the foundational skills and behaviors that can help you become an outstanding candidate for promotion to partnership in your firm. These seven attributes are continually confirmed by in-depth research of CPA firm leaders throughout the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and the Middle East.

The U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) released the long-awaited converged standard on revenue recognition. I have reviewed a number of articles and references over the past week, and have summed up my findings.

Tamera addressed the barriers that keep us from addressing areas in need of improvement, ways to get to the root cause of performance issues, methods and language that inspire others, and ideas for ensuring accountability and success.

The OSTC is a fairly new credit, signed into law in July 2012. This credit supports students whose neighborhood public schools are low-achieving. Some believe that businesses are not yet familiar with this new opportunity to help students who reside within the attendance boundary of the lowest performing 15 percent of public schools.

Cheri H. Freeh, CPA, PICPA past president and a leader in the efforts to streamline and increase efficiency in local income tax collection, has moved to the national stage with her three-year appointment to the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council (IRSAC). Cheri took a few minutes to share her impressions on the experience.

The PICPA’s “busy season” is just beginning to roll with the start of chapter annual meetings. I look forward to this renewal every spring — the weather improves, member activity resurges, and many networking opportunities open up for our members.

I know it’s busy season, and your intention of taking care of you, may have slipped a little, or maybe a lot. What can you do to get back on track? Ultimately it comes down to one question: How important is it to you?

The Pennsylvania Department of Public Welfare (DPW) released the 2014 HealthChoices audit guide on Feb. 7, 2014. The guide was revised through a joint workgroup that consisted of the Office of the Budget, Bureau of Audits (BOA), the DPW, and the Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA).

It’s officially budget season, so let the legislative and political tussles begin. Gov. Tom Corbett unveiled his proposed fiscal year 2014-2015 spending plan to a joint session of the Pennsylvania General Assembly last Tuesday, Feb. 4.