“Practicing professionals have a 15 to 25 percent chance of being sued during the course of their career, ” says Wilhelm Dingler, an attorney in the professional liability department of Marshall, Dennehey, Warner, Coleman & Goggin in Philadelphia.
And mostly for the same reasons, year in and year out: READ MORE →
Independence issues cited.
Brown Smith Wallace, a St. Louis firm with 66 CPAs and 200 staffers, is letting its three-member technology services group join local tech consultants SSE, bringing SSE up to 75 staffers.
Brown Smith Wallace formed its IT team about four year ago, but the firm said it had limited ability to offer technology services to existing clients, according to the St. Louis Business Journal.
“As auditors, our independence is crucial and fundamental to the core of our business. Client demands for complete IT support can be in conflict with that independence,” Tony Caleca (pictured), member at Brown Smith Wallace, said in a statement.
CPA firm consultant Allan Boress asserts that part of the reason that the profession has difficulty retaining people is that we fail to embrace higher values. Lawyers do it with “pro bono” work. But in accounting, “pro bono” is “accounting-ese for ‘are you out of your mind?’ â€
“CPAs are the greediest people I know,” Boress says. “Not that attorneys and doctors and other professionals aren’t. Except they tend to donate time and money to help people.” READ MORE →
Turn problems into profits.
by Rick Telberg
Every business has problem clients, but not everyone subscribes to the “customer is always right” philosophy. In fact, some businesses will actually fire such clients and report being happier and more successful for it.
CPA firms are often told to be strategic in prospecting for and selecting clients to help dodge such dysfunctional relationships-even when money is tight and all clients look like a gem. That’s easier said than done, of course. READ MORE →
H&R Block is testing the waters of Web 2.0 social media with:
A hospital union in Boston says it does.
The 1.9-million-member Service Employees International is arguing that Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center violated the SOX act by including losses from bad debts in its tally of the charity care it provides. The union wants the hospital’s financials restated.
The union has little in the way of legal or regulatory grounds for its argument. And it’s not an organizing tactic. But the union’s point has been made. And I think we can expect more controversies like it. More…
The Southfield, Mich., accounting firm has grown revenue 40 percent in the last three years while adding 30 percent more staff.
Managing partner Don Clayton (pictured at desk) and shareholder Kevin McKervey are targeting growing, mid-sized companies with global ambitions.
They credit the firm’s growth to their focus on identifying and pursuing the one thing that they can be best at, what “Good to Great” author Jim Collins calls a company’s “hedgehog” concept. For C&M, that’s helping entrepreneurial companies from other nations expand into the U.S. and U.S. companies to go abroad. The firm counts new clients from China, Britain and Mexico.
“We’ve got a razor-sharp focus,” Clayton said. “That’s a competitive advantage.”
More here…
