June 2010 - Journal of Accountancy

In response to the severe economic crisis, the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) became law in February 2009. The primary goal of this act was to create and save jobs and stimulate long-term economic growth. Only $275 billion of the Recovery Act funds allocated for contracts,

Periodically the JofA publishes questions on ethics topics that have been raised by AICPA members via the Institute’s Ethics Hotline. This set of questions and staff answers deals with the application of the Code of Professional Conduct (AICPA Professional Standards). 1. A CPA firm has a partner who is “semiretired.”

Errors and omissions in preparing tax returns can occur easily. You might accidentally enter a number incorrectly, misinterpret a law, or misconstrue the client’s facts. Later, before an IRS audit, you might discover the mistake, raising gut-wrenching questions: Do you call the mistake to your client’s attention? Do you advise

At a time when financial regulatory reform is capturing headlines, an online museum administered by the SEC Historical Society is granting users from Wall Street to Main Street equal access to resources, relics and research material. The online galleries at sechistorical.org preserve eyewitness accounts, oral histories, correspondences, research papers and

Many companies, large and small, offer a broad range of products and services to their customers. Often these product and service sales are negotiated at the same time with a single customer, resulting in a single contractually binding arrangement with multiple deliverables. Consider the cell phone company that provides a

Five percent of annual revenue—that’s the estimate of how much money the typical organization loses to fraud, according to participants in the 2010 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse. The report, prepared by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, an international organization of more than 50,000 fraud

Thousands of CPAs and many state CPA societies are using Facebook to help establish and maintain relationships. A search for “CPA” on Facebook yields more than 31,000 results. As more CPAs continue to embrace this venue, privacy concerns are on the rise. As a CPA, I use Facebook both professionally

The 2010 Report to the Nations on Occupational Fraud and Abuse takes a comprehensive look at workplace schemes, their perpetrators, how the crimes were ultimately detected and their estimated cost. The report, released this month by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, is based on data compiled from a study