In United States v. David A. Taylor IRS Lays Down the Law The Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof blog reports on a recent case demonstrating that if a fiduciary has a duty to pay a claim of the government before paying a debt—or they may be personally liable for the unpaid claims of the government! Here are some of the case details: David J. Tyler and Paula I. Tyler were a married couple who held real property on Cricket Lane in Pennsylvania as tenants by the entirety. The IRS issued deficiencies for their income taxes from 1992-1998. On August 20,…
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Weeding out Junk Science? Or Scaring Off Competent Experts? Are Daubert challenges really weeding out “junk science” and “pseudoscience” in the courtroom, or could it be that they are actually scaring off good, competent experts? Given the numbers alone, one can’t help but wonder. Bullseye, a Legal Blog on Expert Topics, reports on a new study that examines the question. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1999 decision in Kumho Tire Co. v. Carmichael, which established that the criteria set forth in Daubert applied to other types of expert testimony – not just that of a scientific nature – the number of Daubert challenges has risen sharply. While…
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New Medical Billing-Code Provides Precision; Nine Codes for Macaw Mishaps Today, hospitals and doctors use a system of about 18,000 codes to describe medical services in bills they send to insurers, Anna Wilde Matthews reported in the Wall Street Journal not too long ago. Apparently, that doesn’t allow for quite enough nuance.: A new federally mandated version will expand the number to around 140,000—adding codes that describe precisely what bone was broken, or which artery is receiving a stent. It will also have a code for recording that a patient’s injury occurred in a chicken coop. (See code.) Indeed, health plans…
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There’s No Accounting for the Subscription Economy It’s taken over 10 years to get the idea of the subscription economy into our noggins, but we’ve barely started internalizing what it takes to support it and report on it as a business, reports Dennis Pombriant at CRM Buyer. Add “Accounting” for 32 Points and a Triple Score “Wall Street types are very accustomed to companies selling products rather than subscriptions,” he reports. But “subscriptions have a mixed bag of revenue recognition ideas that challenge the status quo”: . . . Subscriptions as a way of doing business are just about everywhere;…
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The Unjustly Neglected “Margin Call” Ross Douthat at the New York Times thinks the Oscars missed crediting an important film this year: Speaking of Noah Millman, reading his Oscar post reminds me that my own comments on the year in movies neglected to mention what was perhaps the most striking injustice of the Best Picture nominations: The lack of any love for “Margin Call,” which was, as Millman writes, “not only extremely well-written and well-acted … but an extremely rare effort to accurately depict the culture of Wall Street.” (Be sure to check out his perceptive take on the movie’s moral and professional dilemmas.) The movie did…
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Corporate Investigations Increasingly Aided with Digital Forensics Digital investigators can do more than retrieve data from devices. They can also use data to reconstruct past events to explain how computers were used to perpetrate wrongdoing. Info4Security has introduced a new column, the Forensic Technologist, which will be written by Ernst & Young’s Simon Placks and explore how computer forensics are used to assist corporate investigations. Computer forensic practitioners excel at reconstructing the past into a timeline. Like archaeologists, they excavate digital media and find the artefacts to evidence how that computer was used. We’re very good at finding out how things…
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Blame Disaster on Bad Inputs. Black-Scholes Works. The last few years have given us plenty of reasons to hate financial models. Models that promised to increase efficiency and manage risk became substitutes for common sense and justifications for greed. The real estate bubble was of course justified by them. Yet people at hedge funds and trading firms, using models to mint money, remain passionate believers. Another supporter is George Szpiro, a mathematician turned writer who recently released a book called Pricing The Future, about the history of the Black-Scholes equation, the most famous model in finance and the one that launched…
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Increased Scrutiny for Private Equity Valuations The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started an informal inquiry of private equity firms, asking for a broad range of documents on how the funds value assets and who invests in them, reports Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek. The agency’s Los Angeles office last year sent letters to several firms asking for details on fund investments and the valuation of assets, as well as communication with clients, according to the copy of a letter obtained by Bloomberg News. Firms were asked to produce the documents by the end of last year. Private equity firms have come…
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How Divorce Can Affect Business Valuation Stanley Morganstern at the Ohio Family Law Observer reports that recent case in Ohio illustrates the difficulty of valuing business assets in a divorce. Courts should avoid “double dipping,” or counting a business’ income toward valuation and spousal support. Instead, judges are to separate current and future income from the business’ material assets before making the calculation. I previously discussed the issue of “double dipping” as it primarily pertained to the property nature and income component of retirement plans. As I mentioned, the issue is also relevant to business interests, particularly small business entities. The marital…
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Why PE and the Middle Market Tied the Knot Robert Teitelman at The Deal explains: . . . This is the first of six special issues The Deal magazine will dedicate to the middle market in 2012, with a particular emphasis on a participant that, over the past four decades, emerged from that vast and diverse pool of midmarket companies: private equity. The current political debate tends to overlook the fact that private equity was gestated within the middle market for a very good reason: Midmarket companies, unlike large-cap corporates, have long been relatively starved for capital. Family-owned companies wanted…
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The IRS’s ‘Dirty Dozen’ are Getting Old So opines Gail Perry at AccountingWeb: I for one am getting pretty bored with the tax scams on this list – they hardly change at all from year to year. It’s time for some creative criminals out there to come up with something new. From the comments section: My brother ran a Schedule C Anvil Repair Shop from his garage in order to claim home office deduction, depreciation, etc. He told me the freight bills were a killer. 🙂 Posted by John Hiatt from Valley Forge, PA on Feb 16, 2012 – 4:55 pm…
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The Ten Biggest Family Businesses in the U.S. Business Insurance lists them: Wal-Mart Wal-Mart is the world’s largest retailer and most successful family business of all time. In 1962, founder Sam Walton took his knowledge of discount retailing and opened the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Ark. It wasn’t long before Sam expanded his business and opened up hundreds, then thousands of stores worldwide. After Walton died in 1992, his empire was passed on to his wife and children. Rob Walton succeeded his father as chairman of Wal-Mart, and his brother, John, served on a company committee that oversaw Wal-Mart’s…
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Accounting for Nuts: Blame a misalignment of incentives for the scandal at Diamond Foods. The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins opines: “Business people talk about “alignment of incentives.” The lesson here may concern a peculiar misalignment of incentives.” He explains: Here’s the executive summary: Diamond was a cooperative owned by California walnut growers until it became a publicly traded company owned by shareholders in 2005. Lately reporters and a shortseller-connected analyst have been poking around a $60 million payment the company made to growers in September 2011, which some growers apparently understood to be a “topping up” payment because…
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Kravis: No Better Time than Now to Be Making Investments” Private Equity International’s James Taylor reports that at an invitation-only event in Monaco, the KKR co-founder said that low interest rates and a lack of capital offer ‘enormous’ opportunities for private equity: Kolhberg Kravis Roberts co-founder Henry Kravis struck a bullish tone in a speech in Monaco this week, dismissing talk of a “hard landing” in Asia, suggesting that the American consumer was regaining confidence and highlighting the opportunities for the industry in light of the problems in the banking sector. “There’s probably no better time than now to…
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State Estate Tax Changes The Wills, Trusts, and Estates Prof Blog reports that the federal estate tax exemption was indexed for 2012, increasing the $5 million exemption to $5.12 million. Many of the twenty-three states, including Washington, D.C., that impose state estate taxes have also made changes for 2012. A list of state specific changes to estate taxes for 2012 and beyond is below: To keep up with inflation, North Carolina and Rhode Island increased their exemptions to $5.12 million and $892,865, respectively. Illinois increased its exemption from $2 million in 2011 to $3.5 million beginning January 1, 2012.…
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Three Practice Management Trends for 2012 For the third year, the MGMA has published the State of Medical Practice in MGMA Connexion. It’s an overview of issues and industry perspectives that will shape medical practice this year. The Association collected information from healthcare professionals about the ways in which EHRs increase revenue, as well as what affects your compensation and practice collections, among others. Here are three of the 12 practice management trends: 1. Collections vs. compensation: Setting matters Your practice’s ownership may directly affect your physicians’ pay. Collections for professional charges (i.e., patient visits, procedures) are higher in physician-owned…
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Book Review: Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business Family Business Review recently ran an interesting book review, by Jane Hilburt-Davis, of M.T. Green’s book Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business: 9 Symptoms of Generational Stack-Up and How to Cure Them. Writes Hilburt-Davis: Green introduces a new conceptual framework, the syndrome of “generational stack-up,” defining it as “the convergence of several generations as owners, managers, employees, and shareholders” working together. He maintains that “stack-up”—the clash of generational values and perspectives—is a big problem in general and for family businesses specifically. The reasons, he writes are (a) we’re living longer, (b) we’re working to an older…
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Practice Management Companies Look to ACOs for Growth Physician practice management companies are forging ahead with expansion plans into new areas of hospital-based medicine as they position themselves to participate in accountable care organizations and other aspects of health system reform, reports Victoria Stagg Elliott at American Medical News. The companies are not buying primary care and other outpatient practices right now, although they are expanding into areas of hospital-based medicine that have not traditionally been their focus. This is in part to improve their ability to reduce readmissions and receive bonuses for improving quality and decreasing costs within an…
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Small Firm Innovation Wins ABA Journal Most Popular Site in Legal Practice Management Category Small Firm Innovation, a blog dedicated to first person accounts of small firm success, won the ABA Journal’s Blawg100 competition for most popular blog in the Legal Practice Management (LPM) category. The ABA announcement reports: In the wake of the financial crisis and a rapidly shifting legal landscape, Small Firm Innovation launched in April of 2011 during the ABA’s legal technology showcase, ABA TECHSHOW. A resource by, and for, solo and small firm lawyers, the site focuses on two specific areas: the business side of running…
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Congress Could Pass Online Sales Tax Legislation This Year Are you used to buying stuff on Amazon.com and not paying tax? Lots of business owners are doing it too. And that might change. At Accounting Today, Roger Russell offers an update: The impact of the economic downturn has been felt particularly hard at the state level, with many states operating under a deficit. Since taxes based on income don’t produce as much revenue during a recession as they do during good economic times, transaction taxes, including sales and use tax, become even more important to a state’s ability to fund its…