professionwatch
PRIVATE MATTERS
As the Financial Accounting Foundation
prepared to release the proposals of its trustee working group on private company standard-setting (see our cover story), the American Institute of CPAs announced that close
to 2,500 letters had been sent to the FAF on
the subject. ;e institute, which had created
a toolkit on its Web site to encourage people
to write in, said that the vast majority of the
letters supported setting up a separate standard-setting board.
ACCOUNTANTS CONFIDENCE INDEX
In partnership with ADP®
ACI: Holding Steady
INDEX COMPONENTS
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50
50
3 MOS. 6 MOS.
60
3 MOS. 6 MOS.
54.58 54. 33
100
MIDSIZED BIZ CLIENT
100
LARGE BIZ CLIENT
;e Financial Accounting Standards Board
and the International Accounting Standards
Board have updated the computer-readable
tags for their accounting standards and exposed them for public comment. Comments
on FASB’s proposed 2012 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy are due at the end
of October.
Separately, FASB issued a ;nal standard
simplifying how companies test goodwill for
impairment. (See page 51.) It also added a
new project on the impairment of intangible
assets with inde;nite lives to its agenda. (See
page 19.)
52.91 52.91
50
50
50
3 MOS. 6 MOS.
3 MOS. 6 MOS.
3 MOS.
6 MOS.
100
U.S. ECONOMY
40
Scale:
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50
3 MOS. 6 MOS.
MIXED THOUGHTS ON PRIVATE STANDARDS
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18% 18%
18% 10%
18% 17%
18% 23%
18% 31%
President Obama sent a jobs bill to Con-
gress in mid-September that includes tax
credits for new hires and an expansion of the
payroll tax cut. Earlier in the month, would-be Republican presidential candidates Mitt
Romney and Jon Huntsman presented their
tax plans. Romney’s proposal included reductions in the corporate tax rate, along with
the elimination of taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends, while Huntsman’s favored overhauling the Tax Code by eliminating all tax credits and deductions, including
popular items such as the mortgage interest
deduction, while reducing tax rates to three
brackets of 8, 14 and 23 percent.
1. DOESN’T NEED
AT ALL
2
3
4
5. STRONGLY
NEEDS
STILL THEIR FAVORITE TAILOR
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3%
9%
50%
29%
8%
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Congress passed a patent reform bill that
will, among other things, ban tax strategy patents. At press time, the America Invents Act,
which passed the Senate 89-9, was awaiting
the president’s signature.
UNDER CONTROL
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;; 48% 29% 14% 9%
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The second monthly edition of our Accountants Confidence Index
shows the profession holding more
or less steady in its forecasts for
growth. The 3-Month ACI reading for
this month is exactly the same as last
month’s, while the 6-Month ACI crept
up a fraction.
The results weren’t entirely uniform,
however: The members of our Executive Research Council actually downgraded the short-term prospects for
growth for their own firms, from 59.12
last month to 58.36 this month. And
they lowered their forecast for their
large business clients even more: from
53. 56 down to 52.05. They still see
the U.S. economy contracting a hair in
the short-term (down to 47. 51, from
48.97 last month), but they upgraded
it in the mid-term, expecting a bare
whisper of growth over the next six
months, at 50.85, up from a contrac-tionary 49.99 last month.
In this month’s survey, we also took
the opportunity to ask the ERC about
some crucial regulatory questions; the
results appear at left. Perhaps the most
interesting finding was that, of those
who think that the U.S. needs separate
accounting standards for private companies, fully half think that the best
form for those standards to take would
be a version of GAAP tailored by the
Financial Accounting Standards Board
— somewhat contradicting claims that
the professional overwhelmingly supports a separate standard-setter.
If you would like to participate in
the ERC, please visit www.research.
accountingtoday.com/welcome. And,
as always, feel free to send comments
and suggestions to AcToday@Source-
Media.com.
—The Editors
;e Public Company Accounting Oversight
Board reached an agreement with Norway’s
Financial Services Authority that will allow
the regulators to conduct joint inspections
of PCAOB-registered audit ;rms in Norway.
See WATCH on
7
Data from 418 responses to a September 2011 survey of the Accounting
Today Executive Research Council, an online panel of over 1,000 accounting
professionals. The ERC and the ACI were created in partnership with:
ADP and the ADP logo are
registered trademarks of ADP, Inc.
