• Are Millions of Americans Tax Cheats? Most Who Buy Online Probably Are
    By Isaac M. O'Bannon, Editor - Tuesday June 11, 2013
    Are you paying all of your taxes? There's a good chance you're not. Tax professionals know it. Most accounting professionals know it. When it comes to businesses, most follow at least the letter, if not the spirit, of the law. But most other Americans still don’t seem to understand that they are probably a tax cheat. I’m not talking about 1040 returns and April 15. This isn’t about federal income taxes… it’s about sales taxes . Which actually still has something to do with April 15. [Opposing view: Taxing Internet Sales is Wrong and Doesn't Help Main Street ] More than 60 percent of Americans have, at some time, made a purchase online, according to data from the Pew Research Center and other organizations. More than 20...

  • Firm Staffing - Is the term "Best and Brightest" just an illusion?
    By Sandra Wiley, COO, Boomer Consulting - Friday June 7, 2013
    From the Bridging the Gap blog. In recent conversations about leadership training the words “best and brightest” slip off the tongue of firm leaders like a battle cry. We want to teach and motivate our best people to the highest level in the firm and we do not want to lose them to other firms or companies. We want to develop our identified super stars by teaching them, mentoring them and fast tracking them to higher levels of responsibility at a more rapid rate than has been the case in past experience.  The problem I see with our theory is that we do not analyze who the “best and brightest” really are. We currently identify by looking through the lens that has been formed in our eyes, through our experiences and by the...

  • Hard Times For The GPS Market
    By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Friday June 7, 2013
    From the Bleeding Edge blog . These are not easy times for the commercial GPS marketplace. That may seem peculiar to those who have grown up with these devices. In just a little over a decade GPS receivers have become standard equipment in telephones and automobiles, and GPS inventor Bradford Parkinson predicts that they will soon be used to navigate driverless cars. Consumer Reports has released its latest list of the best GPS units. Nonetheless, the market for these and other stand-alone GPS navigation devices is slowly eroding, due to three factors: GPS devices built into the dashes of automobiles, and even more so the GPS systems offered in smartphones is eliminating the need to buy a dedicated device. This leaves...

  • IRS Alert: IRS retiring two e-Services incentive products on Aug. 11
    By Jim Buttonow, CPA; CoFounder and VP New River Innovation - Thursday June 6, 2013
    UPDATED: The IRS announced late last week that it plans to retire two major e-Services incentive products used by CPAs, attorneys and enrolled agents to file authorizations and resolve IRS account problems. The Disclosure Authorization (DA) and Electronic Account Resolution (EAR) products will be retired on Aug. 11, according to information received from IRS e-help desk representatives. The IRS posted an announcement on IRS.gov earlier today indicating that the products are being retired “primarily due to low usage.” The announcement has since been removed. As a general alternative to support functions previously available in DA and EAR, the IRS website offered phone support through the IRS Practitioner Priority Service (PPS...

  • How Distributed Scanning Helps Streamline Accounting Workflow
    By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Tuesday June 4, 2013
    From the Bleeding Edge blog : I’ve been doing a lot of work writing and consulting on the topics of document management and workflow, and had seriously written off the hardware side of those critical accounting functions. After all, what more could be said about buying printers and scanners. Mike O’Leary at Ambir Technologies changed my mind. Ambir makes scanners and software for document management and workflow, and he took strong exception to the idea that you simply buy a big, auto-feed scanner and put it somewhere in the office. Instead, he presented a concept of distributed scanning by accounting professionals that made strong economic sense. To be fair, Fujitsu , arguably the leader in the scanner market for...

  • Hey IRS, get off my cloud
    By Rob DelGenio, - Thursday May 30, 2013
    In the wake of the resignation of the IRS Commissioner for the agency’s alleged targeting of conservative organizations, there is this chilling IRS policy position that the ACLU recently discovered : “The government may obtain the contents of electronic communication that has been in storage more than 180 days without a warrant.” We already know that the government isn’t supposed to tap our phone lines without a search warrant or read our mail or walk into our homes and rummage through our documents stored in file cabinets, no matter how long we’ve kept them there. So why does the IRS believe it can look at anything we keep in online cloud storage after it’s been there for six months? The answer may shock you: Because a...

  • The Disadvantages of Budgeting
    By Bethany O'Hoyt, - Wednesday May 29, 2013
      On the CPE Link Blog, we’ve discussed the  Advantages of Budgeting , yet we did not discuss the number of serious disadvantages. This article gives an overview of the general issues, while the following sections address the particular problems associated with capital budgeting, as well as the use of budgets within a command and control management system. Inaccuracy .  A budget is based on a set of assumptions that are generally not too far distant from the operating conditions under which it was formulated. If the business environment changes to any significant degree, then the company’s revenues or cost structure may change so radically that actual results will rapidly depart from the expectations delineated in...

  • Four steps to bill more for practice and procedure work
    By Jim Buttonow, CPA; CoFounder and VP New River Innovation - Tuesday May 28, 2013
    From the IRS Inside blog. Confession: Like most practitioners, I had trouble successfully billing for post-filing work . The reasons are complicated. It’s often an issue of back-and-forth time with clients or the IRS/state taxing authorities. This time is hard to quantify and even harder to bill for. And that’s not to mention the multitude of client concerns that arise: Clients may think the issue is the practitioner’s fault, they don’t understand the changing compliance environment, they get upset – and they don’t want to pay for research time associated with post-filing issues. All of this leads to low billing realization. When it comes to the three main service areas in post-filing work – federal and state notice...

  • The High Price of "Free"
    By Dave McClure, Contributing Writer/Columnist - Wednesday May 22, 2013
    From the Bleeding Edge blog . In the very early days of the PC revolution, untold thousands of hobbyists and programmers spread their fledgling programs across the seven major online services (The Source, The Well, CompuServe, AOL, ZDNet, Prodigy and MSN) and thousands of Bulletin Board Systems. The programs were largely free to use, and in fact the few software authors who dared to try to charge money for their efforts were thoroughly castigated as being greedy. Eventually, people figured out that talented programmers could not afford to give away their products, any more than talented musicians or painters could. The market divided into three layers – major software programs that consumers paid for at one end of the...

  • Oklahoma tornado victims receiving help from across the U.S. and globe
    By Isaac M. O'Bannon, Editor - Wednesday May 22, 2013
    As the search for survivors in the tornado-ravaged city of Moore, Oklahoma ends, and the city and state start to rebuild, communities, organizations and churches across the country are rallying to provide relief supplies and funds to help. Those donations may be tax-deductible, but that's not why Americans give to charities that help other Americans hit by tragedies. I live about 6 miles from the devastation in Moore. As editor of CPA Practice Advisor , a national publication mostly for accounting and tax professionals, I read through many national and local publications across the country on a daily basis. Today, however, I noticed an incredible number of articles from small to large cities in every part of our nation that were...