The solution to staff shortages and turnover may be closer than you care to look. How’s does YOUR office rate?
by Rick Telberg
On Careers
No doubt about it: the CPA profession offers a great career. It offers opportunity, challenge and reward like few others.
But linger a while at the water cooler and you’ll hear some complaints. To be sure, misgivings and nay-saying are common in any workplace. But with the profession’s recruiting and retention issues, morale deserves special attention. Staff attitude is no longer an internal management issue; today it’s a strategic factor in remaining competitive.
So we’ve set out to find those cases in which a firm or company, boss or supervisor, or even the CPA or a co-worker can make a difference.
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Maybe It’s Too Late to Ask
The U.S. Patent Office has already issued 41 patents for tax strategies and there are 61 more applications in the pipeline, according to James Toupin, General Counsel, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
And neither the Patent Office nor the IRS think it’s a good idea, according to a report from RIA, the tax research company.
Toupin and IRS chief Mark Everson were two of a number of witnesses testifying at a hearing of the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Select Revenue Measures titled “Issues Relating to the Patenting of Tax Advice.”
In an overview of the issues, the Staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation said: “Patents have increasingly been sought and issued for various tax-related claimed inventions, including strategies for reducing a taxpayer’s taxes. Patented tax strategies that have attracted recent attention include methods that purport to reduce taxes in connection with wealth transfers such as estate and gift planning as well as other situations.”
GET THE FULL REPORT HERE: “Background and Issues Relating to the Patenting of Tax Advice” (JCX-31-06) (pdf).
Commissioner Everson frets that the public may think a patented tax strategy means IRS approves of the strategy. In fact, he noted, a patented tax strategy carries no weight with IRS in assessing compliance with the tax law. He also expressed concern that tax patents place an increased burden on tax professionals, according to an RIA report.
Ellen Aprill, Associate Dean at Loyola Law School, Los Angeles, said that the “proliferation of tax strategy patents would change and burden tax practice.” Download her complete testimony.
See the list of patents and patents pending.
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