Zeune recommends a new clause in auditors’ rep and legal letters
It’s worth wading through a couple commercials to get to this video clip from CNN on a cancer patient who gets her health insurance canceled just as she starts treatment.
Long story, short: The patient wins $9 million. The insurance company employee got bonuses for canceling policies of sick patients. READ MORE →
Americans Are Giving Up Golf
“Over the past decade, the leisure activity has been in a kind of recession,” the New York Times reports, “The total number of people who play has declined or remained flat each year since 2000, dropping to about 26 million from 30 million, according to the National Golf Foundation and the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association. More troubling to golf boosters, the number of people who play 25 times a year or more fell to 4.6 million in 2005 from 6.9 million in 2000, a loss of about a third. The industry now counts its core players as those who golf eight or more times a year. That number, too, has fallen, but more slowly: to 15 million in 2006 from 17.7 million in 2000, according to the National Golf Foundation.”
What will CPAs do for a marketing strategy if they can’t play golf?
Sage Software is launching an initiative to encourage accountants to drive more business to its resellers with free consulting.
It’s a good sign that the top management at Sage is seeking to leverage the company’s most ardent supporters.
The plan seeks to connect the 10,300 firms in the Sage Software Accountants Network, which has over 22,000 members, with the 620 resellers in the Business Partner Alliance. So far, Sage has signed up 121 resellers, or 20 percent of the the BPA.
A newly released study from the Office of Advocacy of the SBA documents the tax burden among small business owners in bankruptcy. The data suggest that the tax burden is more pervasive among small business owners in bankruptcy than among consumer petitioners. While less than one-quarter of all consumers in the bankruptcy sample reported tax debts, more than half of individual small business owners reported owing some tax debts.
“This is more evidence that we need to tear up the current income tax code and replace it with a simple and less burdensome approach,” argues Belmont University Professor (and golf fanatic) Jeff Cornwall (pictured).
And, indeed, there’s plenty to complain about in the tax code. But, for the time-being, it also argues for better entrepreneurial educationa nd the importance of professional tax and accounting services.
GET THE FREE DOWNLOAD (PDF, 39 pages): The Tax Debts of Small Business Owners in Bankruptcy
How do you know?
Here are seven clues before they become clients:
Eight clues, after being engaged:
Source: Mark Lee.
And then writes a book about it.
Dixon Wilson, Chartered Accountants, is a very private firm offering “personal service to wealthy individuals and their businesses.”
So maybe it was understandable in 2006 when a secretary in the Paris office was sacked after her online diary chronicling her Bridget Jones-style life was discovered.
The secretary, Catherine Sanderson (left), lost her job and won it back.
In the meantime, she got a book deal.
“Petite Anglais (In Paris. In Love. In Trouble.)” isn’t due in U.S. bookstores until June. But it’s available March 6 in the UK.
Sounds a like great read!
Better: Take some time off to show people your firm isn’t a sweatshop
Consultant Sam Allred, speaking at last month’s Management Summit, told CPA firm leaders that they’re working too hard and it’s hurting their firm’s ability to compete for talent. In fact, the higher up you go in a CPA firm, the more hours CPAs are booking.
Upper management is among the least likely to take personal or vacation time off, which “eventually leads to burnout in today’s highly stressful CPA Firm environment,” reports Roman Keczyck, CPA.CITP (left). “Sam felt that one of the reasons that young people are not as motivated to work in the accounting profession, may be because all they see upper management doing is grinding out hours, where work is the only priority.”
Read the rest of Roman’s dispatch here…
Also from the Management Summit: Is “independence†really essential? and Consulting for Pigeons
