Financial Department

There are various services which these certified public accountants provide and the major services include financial accounting, planning and analysis; corporate finance and governance; assurance and attestation; forensic accounting, tax preparation and planning; management consultation; information technology and income tax preparation. The corporate finance services are associated with a number of criteria affecting general public like initial public offering, share and debt issuing etc. Interestingly forensic accounting investigates financial frauds and at the same time also plans to detect and prevent financial frauds.

The big corporations, the private sector also uses the services of highly experienced certified public accountants usually designated as Finance Mangers or Chief Executive Officers (CEO) and may be Chief Financial Officer who is expected to have extensive experience in wide range of business knowledge and ultimately applying their knowledge in practice.

Certified public accountants play a very important role in society and they have an on-going responsibility to carry out special tasks for self governance and maintain public confidence. The CPA professionals are distinguished because of their high level of adopting to ethics which is the basis of their professional environment. Most of the business management are well aware of the professional duties these CPAs have and provide them independence especially for the auditor roles.

The certified public accountants perform many functions and the key tasks are finance management like payroll, record keeping, taxing allowances, PAYG variations, work cover, superannuation, Payroll tax, Fringe benefit tax, salary packaging, taxing of annual and long service leave, ending employment calculations etc. Each task in itself quite complex and in spite of all the efforts to simplify these, still these tasks cannot be said “simple jobs.” Read the rest of this entry »

In 2010, President Obama signed into law the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act (HIRE). One of the provisions of the HIRE Act relates to additional reporting and disclosures for US taxpayers with interest in certain foreign assets in excess of $50,000.

The federal government and US Treasury have a strong desire to close the “tax gap.” The tax gap is the difference between what taxpayers should have paid and what is actually paid. Much of the tax gap is willful tax evasion by taxpayers. The remainder is primarily caused by incorrect tax filings due to the complexity of the tax code. Some estimate that the tax gap exceeds $300 billion per year. Obviously, closing this gap is a good solution for Washington (and probably for all honest US taxpayers).

The HIRE Act is attempting to close the tax gap on those with financial accounts in foreign jurisdictions. It does this by requiring taxpayers to report their foreign financial holdings. This disclosure will be completed as part of one’s individual tax filing.

Section 6038D of the HIRE Act requires the following foreign financial assets to be disclosed as part of the taxpayer’s individual tax filing:

1. Any financial account maintained by a foreign financial institution
2. Any of the following assets which are not held in an account maintained by a financial institution:

• any stock or security issued by a person other than a United States person,
• any financial instrument or contract held for investment that has an issuer or counterparty that is not a United States person, and
• any interest in a foreign entity.

The law specifies that the following is to be disclosed regarding these foreign assets: Read the rest of this entry »