NYSSCPA Members in the News

Kenneth Hall (Rochester)
Back to school tax tips
WROC Rochester First
CPA Kenneth Hall discussed some back to school tax tips Monday on News 8 at Sunrise. "The main one is the Child Care Credit," said Hall. "If you have a child, in the I-R-S' eyes, that's less than age thirteen, you can deduct up to twenty percent of three thousand dollars of child care that you pay for one child, and double that for two or more children." He added the adjusted gross income has to be $43,000 or lower and you have to have a registered child care provider.

Other Accounting and Financial News Stories

Companies get new rules to govern cash flow classification
Compliance Week
The Financial Accounting Standards Board has approved a new update to accounting standards meant to clear up inconsistencies in how companies present and classify cash flows. Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-15 is a refresh to Topic 230 of the Accounting Standards Codification to address eight separate cash flow classification and presentation issues. FASB says historic GAAP is either unclear or doesn’t provide specific guidance on the eight separate issues, leading to differences in how companies arrive at their own interpretations.

Why the Math Doesn’t Work for Today’s Market
Wall Street Journal
Stock valuations rise and fall, but when an important factor driving market performance is mathematically unsustainable, it is worth a closer look. That is especially true now when ultralow interest rates make it easy to rationalize stocks at almost any valuation. At minimum, depressed interest rates allow the market to stay higher for longer than under more normal circumstances.

Crackdown on For-Profit Colleges May Free Students and Trap Taxpayers
New York Times
The Obama administration’s decision to bar ITT Educational Services, one of the nation’s largest operators of for-profit colleges, from using federal financial aid to enroll new students shuts off the cash spigot to the troubled company. But it also creates a new set of problems.

City jobs set a record (again!)
Crain’s New York Business
The U.S. has resumed adding jobs at an impressive pace following a lackluster spring that had some worried about the economy. The same is true in New York City, with new figures released last week just after Crain’s published its Stats and the City feature. New York gained a seasonally adjusted 30,000 jobs in July, according to the state labor department, and total employment reached a record 4,321,600.

Central Bankers Hear Plea: Turn Focus to Government Spending
New York Times
Central bankers who gathered here to discuss better ways of jump-starting slow economic growth received a surprising message from their lunchtime speaker on Friday: Stop. You’re making things worse. Christopher A. Sims, a Nobel laureate in economic science, told the annual conference that increased government spending was required to lift the world’s major economies from stagnation.

Prepaid Card Gets First New Features After Glitch
Wall Street Journal
Nearly a year after a technical glitch prevented its customers from getting access to their money, prepaid debit-card provider RushCard is rolling out new features that usually aren’t available to low-income consumers. RushCard, which was founded more than a decade ago by hip-hop producer and entrepreneur Russell Simmons, will introduce a revamped mobile-phone application that lets customers temporarily put their accounts on hold if they misplace their cards.

Self-Directed Retirement Savers May Hit Hurdles When Seeking Help
Wall Street Journal
New federal rules governing how people save for retirement may limit the guidance that investors managing their own individual accounts can get from providers. Rules handed down by the Obama administration in April, requiring brokers to put the interests of retirement savers ahead of their own, mostly will leave investors who manage their own individual retirement accounts untouched.

PwC Reaches Settlement in Taylor Bean Lawsuit
Accounting Today
PricewaterhouseCoopers has reached a settlement in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit involving the 2009 collapse of Taylor Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp. Trustees for the bankrupt mortgage company sued PwC in 2013 for over $5 billion, claiming that PwC had failed to detect fraud at Taylor Bean during the firm’s audits of Colonial Bank, which bought mortgages originated by the company.