The Whitlock Company, CPAs and Consultants, Springfield Missouri

The IRS Oversight Board recently released its 2009 annual report to Congress. The report evaluates the IRS’s performance during the 2009 fiscal year (FY), enumerates strategic challenges affecting tax administration, and provides measures the agency’s performance during FY 2009. According to the Oversight Board’s report, audits of individuals with incomes above $1 million grew 29 percent in FY 2009 compared to FY 2008. However, the number of audits of wealthy individuals represented only 2.58 percent of all individual audits in FY 2009.

The Department of Labor is moving to electronic filing of all Form 5500s starting January 1, 2010. Electronic filing is mandatory. They will not accept paper filings for plan years beginning after January 1, 2009.

I recently read the article, “The 5 Stages of Valuation”, that compares the phsycological character of our clients that receive a declining business valuation to the character outlined in the “Five Stages of Grief”.

Changes Are Substantial
While the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Labor have collectively spent a considerable amount of time and effort overseeing the compliance of the rules governing 401(k) retirement plans, they have spent very little time, up until now, examining the ways tax-exempt organizations operate their 403(b) retirement plans.  This has all changed following [...]

On May 6, 2009 public accounting firm, Grant Thorton sent a letter to Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke and Sheila Bair addressing bank capital requirements and the allowance for loan losses. I believe that this letter completely explains the auditor’s viewpoint on these two issues and offers the regulators a solution to protecting banks from future losses.

Largely unnoticed in last week’s government report on the condition of the nation’s biggest banks was the disclosure that five of them, topped by Bank of America, could lose $99 billion from the kinds of exotic bets that sank the global economy.

Standard-setters have moved on from fixing fair-value rules and have set their sights on off-balance-sheet accounting and loan-loss provisioning.

Revisions to how companies account for off-balance-sheet items and loan-loss provisions will knock fair-value accounting off the front page with respect to financial reporting, according to James Kroeker, acting chief accountant at Securities and Exchange Commission.

As published on the AICPA’s Economic Crisis Resource Center:

Several provisions of the economic stimulus plan may have a significant impact on your company or clients’ business, including the “Making Work Pay” tax credit and a host of COBRA requirements and provisions, ranging from a special 60-day election period and an additional plan enrollment option for COBRA recipients.

Read the article for a summary of the provisions that may affect your business.

The AICPA has developed a website to help deal with issues we are faced with during the economic crisis. The About Us section explains the intent of the website.