ACCOUNTING
FOR DISASTER
See DISASTER on 50
BY MICHAEL COHN
See TAX SOFTWARE on 51
55
54.58
September October
3
50
ANATOMY OF A MERGER p.10
Arizona’s price Kong has ambitious plans to grow
through mergers — and a process to make it happen
YEAR-END TAX PLANNING p.16
Tax columnists Jones & Luscombe on
strategies old and new to help your clients
THE LURE OF PAYROLL p.33
Love it or hate it, helping clients handle their
payroll is proving profitable for many firms
FAF:
Ready
to move
Polley details time
frame for decision on
private co. standards
See FAF on 49
Tax Software Update
Vendors
brace for
next tax
season
The Financial Accounting Foun-
dation is poised to release the proposals of its trustee working group
for changing the structure and
process of the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s oversight of
standards for private companies
and nonprofits.
Top tax publishers
on their concerns,
enhancements
Practitioners tend to vie w tax
In an exclusive interview with
Accounting Today in mid-Septem-
ber, Teresa Polley, president and
CEO of the Financial Accounting
Foundation, which oversees FASB
and the Governmental Account-ingStandardsBoard,indicated
that the proposals for structural
changes at FASB should be out by
the end of September or early October. There will then be a 60-day
or longer comment period to give
constituents a chance to provide
feedback, and any changes in the
structure of the board would likely
happen in 2012.
season with mixed feelings. On the
downside, there’s getting clients
to send you the data you need to
construct their return, and determining ho w much of what they
give you is actually germane to
the return.
Long hours, missed weekends
and frayed tempers add to the
witch’s brew.
Still, tax prep is a, if not the,
major source of revenue for many
firms. And seeing an increasing
bank balance, at least for the short
term, helps most put up with all of
the aggravation coming their way
for months at a time every year.
Given the important role that
The proposals come in response
to recommendations from the Blue
Ribbon Panel on Standard-Setting
for Private Companies, which issued a report earlier this year
calling for the establishment of a
East Coast with massive flooding, widespread power outages
and as-yet-uncalculated billions in damages, many of that
region’s accounting firms were
forced to implement disaster
recovery programs before business slowly returned to normal.
At New Jersey-based regional
As last month’s one-two punch
of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee devastated the
CPA and business advisory firm
WithumSmith+Bro wn, manag-
ing partner Bill Hagaman said
that some of the firm’s partners
had issues with flooding in their
homes, and several WS+B offices
had lost power due to storm dam-
age at the local power company’s
substation.
“One good thing is that our IT
group moved us a long time ago
to the cloud, so everybody in the
officehasremoteaccesstoall
relevantclientinformationand
data,” said Hagaman. “We basically told our people that if they
can’t get in or have other issues,
to use their discretion and they
should work from home or make
up the time later in the week.”
Hagaman explained that he
001_ACTOct11 1
9/19/2011 4:26:11PM
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