Accounting Today - April 19, 2010

Vol. 24 I No. 4 I April 19-May 9, 2010
webcpa.com

AP/ WIDE WORLD

President Obama signs the HIRE Act, which includes provisions for gathering information on U.S. taxpayers’ assets abroad.

A flood of enacted and proposed leg- islation and regulations is making the international tax arena one of particular interest to CPAs and their clients.

The Obama administration’s proposed $3.8 trillion budget for 2011 includes changes to the international tax reform regime, which, if enacted, would have significant implications for multinational companies.

The budget includes proposals to defer the deduction of interest expense related to deferred income; foreign tax credit reforms; elimination of the proposal to repeal the check-the-box rules; and a proposal to tax excessive returns

Taxes know no borders

International tax issues are multiplying fast

See INTERNATIONAL TAX on 37

BY ROGER RUSSELL

About 160 partners and professionals at Denver-based CPA and business advisory firm Hein & Associates receive a quarterly report on the status of their continuing professional education requirements.

If any are delinquent in complying with Colorado’s Board of Accountancy mandate of 80 hours over a two-year period, they receive a “gentle” prod, according to Jim Brendel, the firm’s national director of audit quality. “[The monitoring] gets more intense after the third quarter,” he explained. “If it gets too close to the end of the year, we try to follow the grace periods to make it up, which

CPE

Making sure they make the grade

BY BILL CARLINO

More accounting firms are tracking their staff members’ education requirements

can be anywhere from 30 to 60 days.”
Hein’s tracking process is emblematic of
a widening number of firms that have dedi-
cated staff assigned to oversee CPE require-
ments for licensing, whether the training
courses are held in-house, at a venue away
from the office, or via online delivery.

In fact, according to a recent poll conducted by Accounting Today’s online portal, WebCPA, 70 percent of the firms surveyed indicated that they now actively monitor the CPE requirements of their staff, whether for tax, audit, ethics, Yellow Book or the recent wave of “soft skills” courses now available.

Most firms revealed that they have graduated beyond using basic Excel spreadsheets to track staff CPE totals, with the majority indicating that they have implemented Thomson Reuters’ Reqwired, a learning management and compliance system for both the accounting and legal professions. (Reqwired and Thomson Reuters’ CPE providers MicroMash and PASS Online are all being migrated onto a new platform titled Checkpoint Learning.)

MULTI-STATE LICENSURE

At Berry Dunn McNeil & Parker, a multi-state
firm based in Maine, Lisa Lutterman is one
of the managers charged with tracking CPE
for roughly 150 staff members, including 19
partners, a process that becomes somewhat
more complex when the practice has offices
in other states or its CPAs are licensed in sev-
eral states. In that case, the CPE mandates
of those various state boards have to be met
as well, and not just the dictates of the home
office location.