An Unconventional Approach to Safeguarding Cash Billing schemes accounted for 23.9 percent of all payment-process fraud cases, and most of these cases go on for almost two years before they’re discovered. Here are two simple controls business owners can put in place to dramatically discourage fraud. The first is setting up a system for the owner to regularly review accounting statements each month at home.  ...

This is the question addressed by Richard T. Hurt, Jeffrey M. Gad, Drew LaGrande, and Megan Costa Devault  in a paper you'll find posted in PDF form at JD Supra legal intelligence web site. The authors write for Akerman Senterfit, a law firm with expertise and focus in middle market M&A.  Here's the way things stand now: For the past several years, the federal estate tax law has provided elevated exempt ...

Tracy L. Coenan published a succinct guide to fraud analysis last year in the Wisconsin Law Journal that's very much worth reading.  Excerpt: ...

Metropolitan Corporate Counsel interviews Monte I. Dube, Partner, and Elizabeth M. Mills, Senior Counsel, of Proskauer’s Health Care Department in Chicago. Excerpts: What are the current trends in M&A within the healthcare industry? Dube: Increasingly and for multiple reasons, U.S. hospitals and healthcare systems of all types are looking for potential partnerships or affiliations. Financially distresse ...

Charles Green has posted an interesting thought-piece over at the Trusted Advisor site: When clients don’t buy what a CPA firm is selling, it’s unlikely that they don’t want what you’re selling. More likely it’s that they’re not buying how the service is being sold. For example, a potential client is talking with several accounting firms about a significant assignment. One firm has expertise in that area an ...

Roger Russell recaps the decision at Accounting Today. The Tax Court, in a recent summary opinion, ruled that an individual did not have cancellation of debt income in the year that a collection agency issued him a Form 1099-C and stopped its automated collection efforts. The IRS determined a deficiency in David Stewart’s 2008 income tax of $2,138, based on a Form 1099-C issued by the collection agency. The ...

Corporate investigation may lack the glamour of Bond and Bourne, but the two worlds aren't so far removed.  Former Kroll analyst Chris Morgan Jones tells The Independent's Tim Walker why.  Due diligence and forensic accounting don't set the pulse racing like, say, the trailer for the latest 007 movie, so it's quite a feat for Morgan Jones to have conceived a thriller about business intelligence that is genu ...

Emily Chasan is on the spot with the latest news:   U.S. and international accounting rule makers finally may be ready next month to resolve a debate over corporate lease accounting, that would bring $2 trillion worth of lease obligations onto corporate balance sheets. Members of the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board said Thursday they were ready to v ...

U.S. banks are awash with money from depositors, reports David Reilly in Wall Street Journal's Heard on the Street, while demand for loans lags behind. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s banking profile shows that net loans amounted to 70% of deposits in the first quarter, the lowest figure since 1984. As far as problems go, this isn't the worst to have. Deposit money is still washing over U.S. banks eve ...

PE firms have recently begun to negotiate smaller equity contributions as borrowings increase, reports Matthew Sheahan at Mergers & Acquisitions.   LBO activity came to a screeching halt last summer; there were $19.7 billion issued via 34 deals to back buyouts for all of 2011, but so far this year, nine high-yield bond deals totaling $8.3 billion have been issued to back LBOs. Banks and other creditors ...

The June issue of Investment Advisor includes a story on practice management that features an interesting graphic: ...

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found 123 audit deficiencies related to fair-value estimates and asset impairments in 2010, making asset valuation the most common audit problem. Market volatility always makes it tough to value assets fairly based on market prices.  But that doesn't mean management forecasts—and the assumptions and methodologies of financial modeling used in corporate pricing—c ...

Ace Accounting Today reporter Danielle Lee may well have feared decadence, aggressive and overly-medicated groupies, atonal experimentation, psychedelics, and really bad rhyme.  But she braved the challenges and took on the story in any case, and it turned out to be pretty cool:  An all-CPA band rocked tax day, performing a long set of classic rock during their annual End of Season Tax Bash in a Connecticut ...

Zach Epstein shares the scoop at BGR:  Samsung has accused Apple of calling expert witnesses that exhibit “slavish adoration” to the company during an ongoing patent trial between the two consumer electronics giants. As noted by patent expert Florian Mueller of FOSS Patents, court documents filed by Samsung in California seek to exclude testimony made by a number of Apple’s expert witnesses on the grounds t ...

New private company council includes FASB, but in reduced role, The Journal of Accountancy explains.  "This announcement is excellent news for small businesses that have been concerned about the future of US GAAP particularly in relation to an international move toward IFRS," adds Editor Gail Perry at AccountingWeb.  Emily Chasan at the Wall Street Journal reports: The Financial Accounting Foundation’s Boar ...

The recession is over and entrepreneurs are looking for cash, but are banks willing to lend? The answer is a resounding yes, according to reports at OPEN Forum. OPEN Forum's Katie Morell talks to lending and credit experts to get the tips you need to get that loan application approved.  Here's what she found out: Bankers emphasize that borrowers need to present a solid picture of their business and themselv ...

Investopedia weighs in on the pros and cons of varying approaches: Business valuation is never straightforward - for any company. For startups with little or no revenue or profits and less-than-certain futures, the job of assigning a valuation is particularly tricky. For mature, publicly listed businesses with steady revenues and earnings, normally it's a matter of valuing them as a multiple of their earnin ...

You can’t hold back the demographic tide. In the U.S., another baby boomer turns 60 every eight seconds. This translates into a leadership change in the near future at many CPA firms. In an important article in the Journal of Accountancy last year, John F. Raspante, CPA, and Joseph A. Tarasco, CPA explain:  Thousands of partners are at or reaching retirement age now and in the next five years, putting a tre ...

The AICPA's 2011 Forensic and Valuation Services (FVS) Trend Survey finds growing demand for forensic accounting services.   James Schiavone breaks it down:   ...

 . . . or at least  so opines Edi Osborne, of Mentor Plus, at CPA Trendlines.  She throws in a third promise you've probably heard but we couldn't fit on the subject line:  "No Surprise Billing. Ever."  More:   What do these three tag lines have in common? Predictability. Dominoes and Fed Ex built their entire business model on making (and keeping) an uncomplicated predictability promise to the customer.  D ...