October 2008 - Journal of Accountancy

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The IRS has attempted for many years to categorize rebates as deductions rather than exclusions so that the restrictions of IRC § 162 can be applied. But the courts have allowed exclusion treatment for direct seller-to-buyer rebates. Though the IRS has had some success in the courts

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Hedge documentation is important in both financial reporting and income taxation.For financial accounting purposes, on the date of the hedge, an entity must identify the hedged item, the instrument used, the type of risk hedged, the means of assessing hedge effectiveness, and the risk management objective and strategy.

In this third installment of “In Practice,” we distill research published in tax and accounting journals that should be of interest to busy tax practitioners. The pervasiveness of tax considerations in the affairs of everyone from students to CEOs makes the field a particularly fertile one for studying financial behavior.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY While the United States and Asia focus on XBRL for use in capital markets, Europe has developed an eye-opening array of governmentwide and cross-border applications that can share consistently structured XBRL data for both public and private companies. In Asia, as in the U.S., XBRL is being used

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Current technical literature precludes CPAs from performing review engagements when independence is impaired and requires modifying reports to disclose lack of independence in compilation engagements. The AICPA Reliability Task Force asserts that the conceptual foundation regarding the services CPAs provide to clients should be modified to refocus on

For  U.S. GAAP, the end of an era could be in the making. In August, the SEC unveiled a proposed road map that begins to widen the acceptance of International Financial Reporting Standards. The plan could lead to a requirement for U.S. public companies to begin using IFRS by 2014.

Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan is co-developer of both activity-based costing and the balanced scorecard. In 2006, Kaplan was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame, and received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association. In 2008, the Institute of Management

(Editor’s note: Advocates for licensing reform approached two state attorneys general for their bipartisan perspective on the mobility issue.) In an increasingly global economy, business no longer stops at national borders much less at state lines. With advancements in technology, even relatively small companies have little difficulty extending operations across

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The PCAOB in 2007 raised concerns about accounting firms meeting the brainstorming mandates of SAS no. 99, which requires auditors to brainstorm to determine possible fraud risks, and SAS no. 109, which requires auditors to brainstorm to identify additional causes of potential material misstatements in financial statements. Given