Madoff’s conviction has secured him a place as the inaugural inductee of the Con Artist Hall of Infamy, a website masterminded by businessmen Warren Hellman and Arthur Rock dedicated to documenting history’s “greatest” grafters, hucksters and other assorted quacks, swindlers and frauds.

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson -- a frequent FAE speaker -- delivered a mid-year report to Congress yesterday that identifies the "priority issues" the Office of the Taxpayer Advocate will address in the coming fiscal year. Among the key areas of focus will be working with the IRS to improve taxpayer services, enhancing IRS oversight of federal tax return preparers, improving the accessibility of the offer in compromise program, and working with the IRS to improve its ability to administer refundable tax credits effectively.

The new fiscal year will also mark the 10-year anniversary of the Taxpayer Advocate Service.

Among the areas the report identifies for particular emphasis in FY 2010 are the following:

At a meeting of the NYSSCPA Not-for-Profit Organizations Committee this morning, member Allen L. Fetterman (with his hand raised at left) held up a copy of the latest FASB Statement, No. 168.

"This is the last FASB accounting statement that will ever be issued," he said. "Frame it; hang it on the wall."

He's right: The FASB today launched its Accounting Standards Codification in Statement No. 168 as "the single source of authoritative nongovernmental U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP)," the agency said in a statement. It supercedes all exisiting accounting standards documents, rendering its own format obsolete.

How many times have you thought to yourself, "I love having 500 friends on Facebook, but there's still something missing... Hey, where is the NYSSCPA?"

OK, maybe the Society's absence from your favorite social networking site has not exactly been keeping you up at nights. Nevertheless, you can now proudly display your association with the Society by becoming a fan of the NYSSCPA/ FAE page. When you become a fan, you see NYSSCPA status updates in your newsfeed and gain access to news and photos that can't be found elsewhere.

The Albany Times Union took a break from coverage of legislative shenanigans to write about the accounting reform law in an article that ran in Sunday’s paper. Lou Grumet and Albany-based CPAs Marilyn Pendergast and Kevin McCoy were quoted.

Now it's official: Bernie Madoff should be spending the rest of his life in jail.

He was sentenced to 150 years by federal judge Denny Chin for the $60 billion Ponzi scheme that wiped out the life savings of individuals, and destroyed businesses and a handful of charities.

An article in Rolling Stone describes Michael Jackson's posthumous money matters as a "tangled web of financial issues that may reverberate for months."

Earlier this year, the state tax department's deputy commissioner of enforcement, William Comiskey, told a group of CPA tax return preparers at a FAE tax conference that legislation would soon be introduced that would require them, and every other tax return preparer who filed tax forms in New York state, to register with the state and pay a fee.

American International Group was planning to sell its broker-dealer business, AIG Advisor Group, but some speed bumps threaten to derail the efforts.