AIXYZ?
Mike Block, Tax Fighting C.P.A.
wrote:
>I think Barry Melancon has absolutely got the right idea. He stole
>it from me <G> http://www.gldialtone.com/cleargls.htm and search
>deja news for my AICPA rants the last couple of years....
>
>Obviously, there will be a whole separate organization legally
>and financially from the AICPA. This is not just a question of
>a new "certificate". It is fundamentallly inconsistent with
>independent attest business.
>
>In fact it's great to see that he's gotten inside the AICPA and
>gotten ahold of the microphone; one can only wonder how long
>the big 5 firms will pay for the "Law Enforcemnt" branch of
>the AICPA now that the CPAs are defecting for more modern
>business model. Barry is basically a trojan, cannibalizing the
>old to create the new.
>
>Are you worried about the loss of credibility of the AICPA or CPA
>profession? I'm certainly not. Good riddance.
Ridiculous! How far would you expect to get if you immediately
dropped your CPA initials and substituted nothing or AIXYZ?
Anyone who likes this idea should be compelled to do so at once.
This new designation is more incompatible with the CPA title
than law and accounting ever were.
Many CPAs have long had no use for the AICPA's its failure to
appropriately exempt small businesses from many big business
rules. However, this plan will make current CPA designations
meaningless without creating useful alternatives. It is extreme
profit-motivated megalomania, with no logical foundation. CPAs
are now more trusted than any profession. Any new international
group will have to spend 20 years simply explaining what it is,
before it can possibly think of gaining CPA market acceptance.
A group with many occupations will bring all down to below the
lowest level of any, as disparities in member knowledge, ethics
and viewpoints become excessively obvious. The only good news is
this may finally get the AICPA off the backs of small business
CPAs.
mike block
>It's high time the SEC and the 50 State Boards of accountancy
>found some other authoritative definition of GAAP, and sell it
>to the american people themselves instead of forcing the
>rank and file CPAs to follow the rules set by the AICPA.
>
>Let the Feds and States begin doing their jobs and define GAAP,
>since they're so fond of it. Let them come up with their own
>structures for GAAS, while they're at it, instead of forcing
>the 28 million small businesses in the United States to pay for
>this ridiculous nonsense of Audits, Reviews, and Compilations.
>
>Todd
>
>
>On Tue, 13 Jun 2000 09:33:53 GMT, Jim Hudspeth <jdh...@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
>
>>Looks like the AICPA is about to reinvent itself as AIXYZ, an
>>international association that would include not only accountants from
>>around the globe, but also practitioners of any profession, including
>>lawyers, engineers, actuaries and architects.
>>
>>http://www.electronicaccountant.com/html/atoday/52200dot.htm
>>
>>Move over Bill Gates; hello DOJ.
Mike Block, Tax Fighting C.P.A.
World's #1 QuickBooks Top Tester
FREE 462p QB book/error codes/
80 QB add-ons http://blocktax.com
QB no-spam news:biz.comp.accounting
Ft Lauderdale FL 954-566-7540
Todd Boyle
>Todd Boyle wrote:
>>Are you worried about the loss of credibility of the AICPA or CPA
>>profession? I'm certainly not. Good riddance.
>
>Ridiculous! How far would you expect to get if you immediately
>dropped your CPA initials and substituted nothing or AIXYZ?
>Anyone who likes this idea should be compelled to do so at once.
>This new designation is more incompatible with the CPA title
>than law and accounting ever were.
Dropping my CPA certificate is not ridiculous. Costs exceed benefits.
At this point the only reason I keep it, like most CPAs, it is for
image and marketing.
You have got it backwards, Mike, it is the flesh and blood CPA who pumps
value into the CPA image and franchise, rather than vice versa. The
individual CPA would be much better off, pumping that time and money into
something which was a better storage battery. College students have
figured this out, and are rejecting the accounting majors.
The CPA certificate in practices that serve non-publicly listed, small
and medium enterprises (SMEs) has costs exceeding benefits. I am
thinking of burning my CPA certificate. The ongoing costs and fees
really add up, running at least $10,000/year and for what? Nothing of
value to my clients who are all small/midsized, nonpublic businesses.
1. Hundreds of dollars per year in State licensing costs.
2. Over $1,000/year for AICPA and state society dues.
3. At least $2000/year for any accredited CPE courses that are worth
the time to attend,
4. Continual extra time and busywork, preparing footnotes and
compilation letters for any "Financial Statements" I'm "associated with"
in cases where they are used only by the owners of the business, for
management.
5. Liability insurance. The CPA certificate triggers a whole mesh of
statory and case law, making CPAs pay for losses and errors that are
overwhelmingly the fault of defaulting businesses and lack of diligence
by owners and lenders.
6. Continual extra work and reading, unlearning the ideologies dished out
at CPA CPE sessions which is designed to serve the powers that be,
and to figure out instead, what really matters to small business, and
how to achieve it.
Look. I am a small businessman. This CPA certification adds to the
terrific load of BS faced by all small busineses (federal and state
taxes, state corporation renewal, state and local business licenses,
etc.) Keeping current on the thousands of arbitrary and unnecessary
federal tax changes, but require massive study and upgrades of tax
software and libraries, etc. We don't have infinite time or energy for
these distractions.
I read this morning there are more than 9,000 members in our state CPA
society. The ethical thing to do would be to burn our CPA certificates
like we did with our draft cards, and then have a big convention to
talk about what our small business clients REALLY need.
Rather than operate as tools of the government in tax and regulatory
schemes we could be helping make the world a better place, helping more
with the nuts and bolts of running the economy and enhancing
communication and cooperation between enterprises. Please, read some
specific things that need to be done:
http://www.gldialtone.com/cleargls.htm
There is a great need for the semantics used in business (including
GAAP) to be extended downwards to a more granular level of the
accounting process.
There seems to be a natural law in operation, that improvements in
interoperability and automation of accounting systems are impossible
until there is agreement on naming the tables, the fields, and the
values in the databases. The tables for example would include
"Customer", "Vendor", "GLAccount". Allowed values in the Name of
GLAccount would include cash, trade accounts receivable, inventory. If
people want to be creative with names of GL Accounts they would go to
war with CPAs because their account names would be regarded as
deceptive, or frivolous.
It is interesting to note CPAs have the top level semantics nailed down
pretty tightly-- what you can say in financial statements and how it
must be said.
At the very bottom, in most industries there are also many useful
standards. For example, retailers have uniform bar codes. There are
global company IDs in the DUNS numbering system. Medical industry,
HCFA/ACE, is another good example. CPAs need to close the GAAP gap: to
define some standard terms for account codes and other mechanics,
between the Bar Codes level and the top level semantics of financial
statements.
Web technologists are working feverishly on standards that will soon
make CPAs as irrelevant as buggy whips. Why? Because once the
semantics of the basic transactions are agreed upon, they will be
pipelined directly to investors (who by the way, have moved beyond the
CPA's debates how to layout the Cash Flow Statement, and need the more
granular account data more than they need CPAs.) This is why XBRL
is sandbagging on any XML for General Ledger.
The AICPA, FASB, GASB, the State societies of CPAs, and the Boards of
Accountancy and numerous other organizations have managed to become our
bosses.
So, the rational response is, like that old song by Johnny Paycheck,
"Take this job and shove it"
What the independent CPA needs to do is get over the continual
brainwashing about "independence" and "objectivity", and stop carrying
water for the Fortune 500 companies and their big-5 CPA firms who define
GAAP. We must stop this dominance/submission stuff of going around
telling people what to do, how much tax to pay, how to prepare their
financial statements, what buzzwords are ok in the footnotes and which
ones are taboo.
The other side of pushing people around, is being pushed around by the
fake gods we have erected, in Washington DC and New York. We've become a
quasi-public sector bureaucracy. A bunch of cowards who bully the small
business sector to extract fees.
You have to obey all the rules set by AICPA, FASB, GASB and other
private organizations that dictate GAAP and GAAS rules, ethics rules
and god knows what else. And you have to be a member of the state
society, instead; there's no other way to get access to information to
keep current on the rules.
To keep up with the constantly changing rules, you have to pay for
continuing education and library subscriptions. And all the GAAP and
GAAS rules are copyrighted-- their revenue model is to screw the rank
and file CPAs, to get the revenue to pay for their bossy, self-appointed
committees and pay for their buildings and media channels. You have to
obey GAAP but it's not public! You have to pay the salaries of
the GAAP czars who write the rules!
Under the law, if you publish financial statements under anything other
than AICPA/FASB GAAP, you are opening yourself up to a lawsuit, if not a
fraud conviction. These guys mean business.
GAAP and GAAS may be needed, at the NYSE and NASDAQ companies. I doubt
it. Maybe in the era before computers. But I don't really care: I
argue that local CPAs should be allowed to practice without mandatory CPE,
mandatory peer review, mandatory high-cost GAAP /GASS subscriptions from
self-interested private organizations.
CPAs in other words, should be allowed to perform services to the
public, and the public should be protected only by the civil tort system
just like other industries. We've been suckered into this repressive
arrangement by our own egos. The AICPA convinced us we're so special we
need "self-regulation" --and they've been bleeding us ever since. We
would have been a lot better off without any special treatment. We
should have formed a union like the Teamsters, instead of this stupid
AICPA arrangement.
The AICPA/NASBA's joint product, the UAA, is a classic example. The UAA
new CPA model will require a totally new, intense regime of CPE
including complicated competency testing and evaluation, etc.
===
Let's all get together and burn our CPA certificates down at our state
capitols.
We could invite the press. It wouldn't be any more binding than it was
when we burned our draft cards, but it would be one way to let off
steam, and draw attention to the issues.
Another thing I'm ready for right now: forming an Alternative Society
of CPAs having as its guiding objective, serving the interests of small
CPA firms and sole practitioners, and our millions of clients in small
business. Tectonic Plates break away when the forces pulling in
different directions are too great.. that's a perfectly good and natural
thing.
It is odd that the rules of GAAP and GAAS change every 6 months. CPAs
end up paying hundreds of dollars to AICPA and state societies for
courses and instructors to "stay current."
These rules are supposedly matters of grave monetary concern to every
business in the country, so important that the government steps in to
enforce them after FASB and GASB define them.
These rules are supposedly of great ethical significance and
consistency, and uttered by sages and elders with subtle and profound
intellects.
So, isn't it odd that they can change so often? Reminds me of the tax
code. In 1976, your combined federal and state tax rate could reach as
high as 90% and it was unethical and immoral if you didn't pay 90%.
Five years later the marginal rate on the same dollar might have been
40% under Reagan. Then, 40% was ethical enough. At least the pope is
consistent, it's a mortal sin to skip church on Sundays, and you go to
hell, and the rules don't change every 6 months.
Face the matter squarely: the societies, CPE industry, FASB and GASB
all get paid for churning the rules. If the rules don't change there
isn't room for 330,000 well-paid consultants etc. enforcing them.
And CPAs ourselves get paid, in turn, for the complexity of rules that
are imposed on the business sector by laws in the United States.
Rules which are utterly mediocre and often arbitrary, notable only for
being impossibly large for the businessman to economically traverse.
The overall heft of the ruleset must be sufficient to make learning
them uneconomic except for specialists. Thus, does our economic system
play tricks with our minds. The DNA blindly organize itself around its
food source. Our profession trace its darwinian path thru the decades,
without leadership.
I'm not saying that no rules should ever change.
I'm just saying that the rate of change in reporting rules and in
ethics, has become inexplicably high, and the level of detail and
complexity, likewise, is inexplicably high. At the same time, the
reference material and CPE courses are needlessly expensive and too
often, rules which are binding by law, are not even available to the
public without paying high prices, because they are protected by
copyright.
And, not coincidentally, all these rules seem to come out of the New
York and Washington areas of the United States.
Now, we have these dudes visiting our firms for "quality assurance"
having the swords of damocles hanging over our heads, with rapacious
lawywers specializing in extortion from CPA firms, close on their heels.
The whole thing STINKS. If NewYorkingTon wants us to follow the
rules, better make them
1. understandable,
2. having a rational basis in protecting the economic interests of
the millions of small business in the US, not only Wall Street,
3. available for free and explained in plain english,
4. and not changing so often.
And this applies to the tax code as well as GAAP.
I know for a fact that many small CPAs would not agree with my tone but
many, perhaps a majority, would agree with my message privately.
They know that they will get heat from the state, the society, the IRS,
and their clients if they speak out like this. Their clients will be
audited by the IRS, and their banks will question their loan
applications.
CPAs fear their position in any future lawsuit will be weakened. Their
competitors will use their comments to undercut them in new business,
or retaining existing clients. So they keep quiet, increase their fees
a little more, count the days until retirement.
AICPA has exerted its maximum efforts to bottle up, block, and shut down
any production of Income Statements, Balance Sheets, etc. from our
clients without paying for the services of a CPA which they require in
their pronouncements. These positions of AICPA are ethically
questionable.
Obviously the small business community is going to utilize the services
of non-licensed professionals, particularly the software industry, in
future years. It's an unnatural situation which cannot last.
CPAs who do not perform Audits and Reviews (Such as myself) also need to
look in the mirror, and ask: Why am I trying to steal reputation from
the Big 5 audit firms, AICPA, and other companies in the whole fearsome
GAAP reputation industry?
Most CPAs serve small business, performing accounting and tax and
financial consulting services *WITHOUT* underwriting the reputations or
credit of their clients in any way, especially audit or review.
We should split off and form a new industry, together with the
accounting and financial reporting segment of the software and internet
industry. We should burn our CPA certificates down at the State
Capitol, and reform ourselves into an industry that is more attuned to
the needs of society and markets in 21st century.
The former CPA would save thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of
overhead, on AICPA, State society dues, CPA, CPE, Liability Insurance,
State CPA licensing, QARs and peer review. The former CPA would
probably save further thousands on clothes, office space and other
useless symbols of status that don't deliver value to the market. This
is nothing new but networks are truly new, and change everything.
I envision the Alt-CPA certificate might be issued by a private sector
company rather than Government. It might require a CPA certificate plus
a choice of additional exams in specialties like internet transactions,
software development, databases, XML, network security, vertical market
knowledge such as accounting systems in healthcare, etc. The AICPA's
XYZ certificate will be a complete joke: all of the present AICPA
members would be grandfathered into it. They will be
incompetent--weakened from 80 years of living under the soviet state,
they're incapable of living under perestroika or the free enterprise
system.
The new Alt-CPA Franchise corporation, or its certification body would
not be immune from the problems and limitations of any large society
like AICPA. In fact the Alt-CPA Society would have the same difficult
task of defining and implementing reporting standards, policing its
members, etc.
But it would have a fundamental difference: by strictly keeping OUT of
the business of any type of assurance of its clients' financial
statements or reputation, it would be able to practice its profession
without being predated upon by lawyers, governments and big AICPA types
of organizations.
To become an alt-CPA, I would propose a one-time conversion from the
CPA. It would be a one-time threshhold, once you pass the tests, you'd
let the state licensing lapse. Your continuing education would be
performed at much lower costs over broadband networks. Quality
Assurance would be achieved in an ongoing process integrated with the
network, perhaps by realtime submissions of work products, perhaps with
review software applied to the web ledgers of consenting clients. GAAP
Standards and Tax updates would be rolled out in XML on a "best effort"
basis. Let the buzzards from AICPA have the grunt compliance work.
This new franchise company would displace the regular CPAs in the
market, because it would deliver better services at lower prices.
This sounds like a pipe dream but the basic infrastructure above could
be built with an expenditure of perhaps 100 man years.
When you consider the sickening waste of talent, where we have 5
million midlevel accounting clerks in the US, and 500,000 man-years
spent by CPAs every year mostly on dumb processes manually sorting out
accounting data, the amount of time it would take us to reorganize
ourselves is trivial. We should turn away from our incompetent leaders
and all the statutes and common law that enslave us, and create a whole
new industry.
If AICPA had any sense, they would change the rules to deregulate all
services other than statutory audits.
If the AICPA and their members in the accounting profession want to have
a branded service called Reviews or Compilations, that's fine. But the
government doesn't have any business imposing sanctions on CPAs who
provide those kinds of services, any more than they impose sanctions on
non-CPAs who perform those services.
The AICPA has somehow managed to restrict CPAs only from using the term
"Review" or "Compilation", which are essentially a branded service,
without complying with all their legalistic rigamarole and paying
literally thousands of dollars of annual overhead (much of it to the
AICPA itself.)
What the AICPA has somehow managed to do, furthermore, is restrict CPAs
from even doing anything RESEMBLING those types of services!
And the State regulators of the 50 states let the "profession" regulate
itself, since they're too lame to undertake an independent assessment of
the issues themselves....
No, it's hopeless. AICPA will never get it. What's needed is a new
Alt-Public Accountant profession having as its principle goals, to
provide practical services to Small and Medium Businesses without the
costs, interruptions, and distractions and irrelevant nonsense coming
down from our robed masters on the east coast.
It is my belief that the imposition of Big GAAP and GAAS on the small
business sector is not motivated by any genuine concern for the
interests of SMBs or their stockholders or creditors. Such concern is a
smokescreen for the true motivation of the AICPA and its leading firms.
The true motivation is to reduce the cost advantage of small CPAs and
unlisted companies who do not require audits. Quite frankly those firms
pay themselves very well and have higher expenses across the board.
They fear smaller firms' ability to provide high quality financial
reporting to Small, Medium and yes, Large businesses.
Consider, if new forms of GAAP might even emerge. Who cares? Is there
some social evil, in financial statements between consenting adults
that do not comply with big GAAP? Why should this be illegal?
Constitutional protections for freedom of speech begin to apply, at some
point. Who decides that threshhold?
New forms of thinking might emerge besides the ideology we've been
memorizing from the FASB and GAAP and IRS, our whole lives. New forms
that don't coincidentally, result in great transfers of wealth to the
East Coast. New forms that don't result in massively illogical behavior
of the human race, depleting common resources and polluting the common
environment, for example, or selling addictive and harmful products,
filling the media with misleading advertising and even worse garbage.
Perhaps its time for a fresh look at the pitiless Newtonian meatgrinder
of Debits and Credits, Payables and Receivables. These have served us
well but once you get to the higher levels of maslow's hierarchy they
really don't work too well. There are plenty of good writings CPAs
should read for their CPE, here, for example..
http://www.chaordic.org/chaordic/accounting_for_the_XXI_century.htm
People evolve. What happens, when increasing numbers of people reach a
stage of evolution where they derive inherent joy from working and
producing, without a financial accounting system? Especially one which
limits their freedom, and introduces thieves into every aspect of their
daily business.
Do you remember when advertising and phone solicitation were
"forbidden". CPA ethics committees warned us to make absolutely sure
that our name didn't find its way into more than one phone book.
I was that guy in the back, scratching my head and whispering to the
other people, but they were as mesmerized as moonies or krishnas. They
frowned at me, regarded my comments as profane.
In today's world, it's nonsense to have such finely calibrated ethics,
applied across the millions of companies in the Small Business sector by
the CPAs who serve them. To begin with, we all see large numbers
within our client base with business practices outside the bounds of
society's ethics. But when you look at the ideology and message of GAAP
and money economics, our fundamental business, it is almost totally
devoid of morality. The market is the moral compass of business, of
GAAP, and of CPAs.
In effect the SEC and the tax authorities make this bargain: they will
give CPAs the privilege of milking our clients by blocking entry of
other accounting services, if we will enforce their rules upon small
business.
Lets remember, the whole purpose of the rules is to transfer wealth to
the government, and to elites who own vast holdings of stock, and to
large CPA firms who historically created the framework within the
AICPA. (this was not created by mom and pop CPA firms.)
So, the AICPA festoons GAAP rules with all this sanctimonious ethics
rules, a fig leaf which covers up the real economic transaction.
Todays world is really in evolution from a *very* unfair and cruel
past, to a somewhat better future. I can remember all too clearly my
government tried to kill me, by sending me to Vietnam. For no good
reason and against the will of American people.
We still have a looooong way to go.
Today, we have legalized gambling and abortions, and cars hurtling down
the streets and highways up to 70 mph legally, ripping bodies to shreds
killing 250,000 people a year. Guns designed for no use but killing
people, are legal, hundreds of thousands killed. Addictive drugs are
the *single largest dollar product* in international trade. And our
military enters more new countries every year, together with our rich
allies, to ensure the smooth flow of oil, and money into our securities
markets here in the company store. Party leaders in congress fight
campaign finance limits or even disclosures of sources, who are often
foreign money.
And we, in the accounting and legal professions are the very heart and
core that operates the actual machinery of this entire system. Look,
I'm not complaining-- I'm getting fed. But we're supposed to buy this
baloney, that CPAs advertising in the Yellow Pages is unethical? Gimme
a break.
And now we have this rule that its unethical and a public menace if
CPAs are associated with financial statements without stapling our
compilation letter? And the letter must tell the client that the
financial statements omit substantially all of the disclosures required
by GAAP? Or the client can pay us $1,800 extra, to sprinkle our holy
water on the statements.
FASB.org is a top-down broadcast station, operated by the For-Profit
companies who are members of FASB, for the single purpose of enforcing
their crafty accounting rules and transferring wealth to themselves.
Beginning with charging you $20 for each FASB pronouncement, so that you
can read them in order to obey them, before your State Board jerks your
license or arrests you.
As an intellectual exercise, one might ask, what would small business
clients' financial reports look like, if we were not bound by law to
produce them in GAAP format. Reasonable people might question whether
GAAP F/S are the best vehicle for presenting fairly etc. etc. for small
unlisted companies.
There are many diverse writings on how accounting might perhaps be
extended to provide a quantitative or semantic model of the enterprise,
beyond the scope of GAAP today. I'm not the right guy to describe them
but examples are environment accounting, knowledge accounting, etc.
The problem isnt' that GAAP FS are defective as such, but that they
provide such an incomplete model of the enterprise either
retrospectively or with respect to future prospects. The real prospects
of a company are modelled better and more completely, by stock analysts
and investors than by CPAs. Look on websites like motley fool.
CPAs eschew the models of portfolio managers for their lack of
objectivity, and so forth. But who is doing society a higher service?
Portfolio managers dig into the culture of a company, they gather
evidence of behaviors of divisions and executives within a company and
of its markets, etc.
Consultants and software companies in the OLAP and data mining
industries manage to systematically model these things to great
benefit. In my opinion they are using their brains. We CPAs are just
working mechanistically and as a result, we have become a fulcrum for
other industries to get rich. Worse, we have reduced not only
ourselves, but our clients, to mechanical roles. GAAP by itself
disempowers by omitting anything that has not been objectively counted,
in historical real dollars.
So perhaps the whole of GAAP itself should be thrown in the garbage.
Certainly, the legal sanctions for publishing financial statements not
in conformance with the AICPA/FASB flavor of GAAP should be thrown in
the garbage.
People of course will still maintain accounts and financial statements.
But each will be viewed freshly and creatively, and a free market in
financial and semantic modelling of the enterprise will bring great
benefits to the economy.
This is called deregulation in other industries.
XBRL by the way, is incredibly important in creating the framework for
extended financial modelling of the enterprise. It is literally a
lifeline for CPAs to be included in the future industry of financial
modeling rather than being ignominiously parked on a side track,
forever.
Dec. 31, 1999 I quit my small number of compilation engagements. It was
just impossible to amortize the cost of the research and CPE needed,
for that small a number of financial statements, under the complex and
ever-churning mass of rules emanating from our robed masters in AICPA
and FASB.
I would have to spend at least 30% of my year on compilations, e.g. 25
sets of financials per year, to maintain a decent skill level, pay for
the PPC, the insurance, the CPE, etc.etc.
I also quit doing corporate returns. Same deal. I'm just not
interested in doggedly studying and learning all the arcane nonsense
that comes out of Washington DC every year. Been there, done that. I
paid off my mortgage in 1997 and I'm outa here guys.
What it boils down to is stopping ripping off my clients with all these
childish tricks of the accounting profession, and get busy building
systems that make all these things automatic. I refuse to go along
with with the whole GAAP process of the AICPA, or implementing the
ridiculous piece of crap called the Internal Revenue code, either. I'd
rather drive trucks if that's what it takes.
What is the answer, going forward? That is the interesting question.
December 31, 1999 I took the metadata pledge. I will do no more
numbers, forever. I will only work with metadata. If the systems have
potential to process *types* of information, or to be configured or
integrated to process things automatically, I'll gladly do the work..
happily. cheaply. That's what I love doing.
SMEs will send and receive orders, invoices and payments over the
internet. If their webledger provider and their other BSPs (service
providers) are doing their jobs, then NOBODY is going to have to re-key
anything, anyplace, ever again. Certainly not their CPA.
But I will never again charge a client to take a number from one place,
and add it or subtract it or rekey it into another place. I don't want
to see any numbers, type any numbers or read any numbers. Those are
the *owners' problem.* If the owner isn't willing to read his own cash
flow statement, I won't work with him. If the statement is wrong or
has insufficient drilldown for him to understand, well, thats MY job, to
fix.
So, you ask me, would I burn my CPA certificate? Yes.
Todd
* Todd F. Boyle CPA http://www.GLDialtone.com/
* tbo...@rosehill.net Kirkland WA (425) 827-3107
* XML accounting, web ledgers, BSPs, ASPs, whatever it takes
Mike Block, Tax Fighting C.P.A.
On Wed, 14 Jun 2000 23:01:17 GMT, tbo...@NoSMAProsehill.net (Todd Boyle)
wrote:
>Mike Block wrote:
>>Todd Boyle wrote:
>>>Are you worried about the loss of credibility of the AICPA or CPA
>>>profession? I'm certainly not. Good riddance.
>>
>>Ridiculous! How far would you expect to get if you immediately
>>dropped your CPA initials and substituted nothing or AIXYZ?
>>Anyone who likes this idea should be compelled to do so at once.
>>This new designation is more incompatible with the CPA title
>>than law and accounting ever were.
>
>Dropping my CPA certificate is not ridiculous. Costs exceed benefits.
>At this point the only reason I keep it, like most CPAs, it is for
>image and marketing.
Exactly! Many may drop our CPA when it no longer pays in image and
marketing, meaning good demand and superior fees. Few occupations
match CPA income for those of my age.
>The CPA certificate in practices that serve non-publicly listed, small
>and medium enterprises (SMEs) has costs exceeding benefits. I am
>thinking of burning my CPA certificate. The ongoing costs and fees
>really add up, running at least $10,000/year and for what? Nothing of
>value to my clients who are all small/midsized, nonpublic businesses.
>
>1. Hundreds of dollars per year in State licensing costs.
It is only $100 in Florida.
>2. Over $1,000/year for AICPA and state society dues.
Why pay groups that make you apply big company rules
to small businesses? I don't!
>3. At least $2000/year for any accredited CPE courses that are worth
>the time to attend,
40 hours a year times about $2.50/hour for http://gleim.com/
self-study = $100, less double hours earned giving seminars
to get new clients.
>4. Continual extra time and busywork, preparing footnotes and
>compilation letters for any "Financial Statements" I'm "associated with"
>in cases where they are used only by the owners of the business, for
>management.
Stock compilation letters, with fill in blanks, take about
1/2 hour and add $100+ to fees. 1/4 hour to type and copy
adds $50+ more. What footnotes?
>5. Liability insurance. The CPA certificate triggers a whole mesh of
>statory and case law, making CPAs pay for losses and errors that are
>overwhelmingly the fault of defaulting businesses and lack of diligence
>by owners and lenders.
What insurance? I do no reviews or audits. Most liability
can be avoided with good engagement letters, personal hold-
harmless guarantees and mandatory arbitration. No one ever
threatened suit.
>6. Continual extra work and reading, unlearning the ideologies dished out
>at CPA CPE sessions which is designed to serve the powers that be,
>and to figure out instead, what really matters to small business, and
>how to achieve it.
That takes about 40 hours a year.
>Look. I am a small businessman. This CPA certification adds to the
>terrific load of BS faced by all small busineses (federal and state
>taxes, state corporation renewal, state and local business licenses,
>etc.) Keeping current on the thousands of arbitrary and unnecessary
>federal tax changes, but require massive study and upgrades of tax
>software and libraries, etc. We don't have infinite time or energy for
>these distractions.
I tell most clients to use tax returns, not financials. Returns
are conservative, so creditors cannot charge me with inflating
numbers. Few CPA rules apply.
>I read this morning there are more than 9,000 members in our state CPA
>society. The ethical thing to do would be to burn our CPA certificates
>like we did with our draft cards, and then have a big convention to
>talk about what our small business clients REALLY need.
I will pay some CPA society savings to a group that will create
better small business accounting rules, especially if they may
give me equally valuable marketing credentials. We can agree on
better rules in months, but we should not drop CPA until we get
equally valuable alternate designations. It may take 20 years.
>Rather than operate as tools of the government in tax and regulatory
>schemes we could be helping make the world a better place, helping more
>with the nuts and bolts of running the economy and enhancing
>communication and cooperation between enterprises. Please, read some
>specific things that need to be done:
>http://www.gldialtone.com/cleargls.htm
We certainly do not "operate as tools of the government in tax
and regulatory schemes." 25 years ago I saw how insanely fast
government was growing, in cost per person in constant dollars.
Since then I have done all I can to legally take tax dollars
away from it, in my practice, by lobbying and by successful
state constitutional amendment petitions. CPA certificate burning
will diminish my ability to do this, and may make us impotent
"tools of the government in tax and regulatory schemes."
CPAs are too highly respected to be replaced, so burning is wrong.
I do not believe you! I dare you to prove me wrong by
burning your certificate and resigning from your state
regulatory agency.