Official Newsletter of Arizona Society of Practicing Accountants Affiliated with the National Society of Accountants
ASPA
Board of Directors Meeting June 24, 2010 For times see page 6
Rio Rico Rio Rico, AZ
May—June 2010
President
Jo Ann Sabbagh P O Box 12007 Tucson, AZ 85732-2007 520-867-8833 josabbagh@msn.comEditor
Mary Molano, EA, ABA, ATP P O Box 54774 Phoenix, AZ 85078-4774 602-568-3779 unicorntax
1
@cox.netExecutive Secretary
David Freeland813 W Elliott Road Suite #1 Chandler, AZ 85225 480-782-8872 800-393-0647 Fax 480-899-1803
david@christinezfreelandcpa.com
Inside this issue:
By-Law Changes
1
June Seminar Info
2
Continued By-Law
Changes
3
Board Officer Roster
4
Chapter Meetings
4
For the Good of ASPA4
NSA Happenings
6-7
Up coming Seminars
9
Volume XV Issue 1
Notification of proposed Bylaw amendments
ARTICLE VI
COMMITTEES
Section 1 – Standing Committees. The President shall appoint,
sub-ject to Board approval, the Chairman of each of the standing
Commit-tees, who shall serve for a period of one (1) year coinciding with the
terms of the officers of the Society. The standing committee shall
consist of the following:
a. Membership Committee;
b. Professional Ethics Committee;
c. Education
and Compliance
Committee;
d. Legislation Committee;
e. Finance Committee;
f. Liaison Committee;
g. GATAP
Strategic Planning
Committee;
In addition, the Board may establish such additional committees as it
deems appropriate. Each standing committee shall consist of no less
than two (2) active members appointed by the Chairman of each
com-mittee. All committees shall maintain a majority of active members.
Each committee shall be required to report periodically to the Board.
Please be aware on the proposed By-Law changes a
strike through
is
a deletion to the text and
red bold
is an addition or a change in the
text.
The
ASPA Accounting Seminar
will be
June 25-26
in lovely Rio Rico at the
Esplendor
Resort.
Room rates are $94 per night plus a $5 resort fee and reservations can be
made at 520-281-1901. Rates are guaranteed until June 1. Make your reservations now!
Friday, June 25, 2010
8 hours
Accounting
Some of the covered topics:
"
SSARS 19 will change the landscape for compilations and reviews. Effective for periods
ending on or after December 15, 2010, SSARS 19 will be the only SSARS in effect for
compilations and reviews. Will you be ready for the changes?"
"With all of the talk about International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) replacing
US GAAP...just what are IFRSs? What are the differences and similarities? What does it
mean to me as a practitioner?"
"Will there be a Small GAAP? This has been discussed for years and still is in discussion
stages. But could they be here already? IFRS for SMEs (Small and Medium Sized
Enterprises - non public entities) is here. What are they all about?"
Saturday, June 26, 2009
8 hours
A Little Bit of Everything
Ethics 2 Hours
Quick Books 4 hours
Social Media 2 Hours
ASPA Annual General Meeting
For the ASPA Board and those arriving early:
Thursday, June 24
11:30am
ASPA Leadership Development Training
Lunch Provided
3:00pm
ASPA 09/10 State Board Meeting
4:30pm
ASPA 10/11 State Board Meeting
6:00pm
Margarita Reception
AND EVERYONE IS INVITED TO…
Friday, June 25
6:00pm
Cocktails
6:30pm
Banquet and Installation of Officers
By NSA President Robert Cross
Followed by Monte Carlo night
For more information call please 480-782-8872
Page 3 The Ariz ona Roundup
a. Membership Committee. The Membership Committee shall be responsible for
coordinating with the chapters and establishing programs to secure additional
membership for the Society. The Committee shall review all new applications
and the credentials of the applicants and shall make determinations as to an
ap-plicant’s eligibility. Any such determination is subject to the review of the
Board upon request of any applicant. The Committee shall direct the Treasurer
to bill the applicant for appropriate dues and shall notify the member of his or
her admission. The Committee shall also direct the Secretary in the
mainte-nance of the roster of membership.
b. Professional Ethics Committee. The Committee shall be initially charged to
draw up a code of ethics, define procedures for administration of the code, and
further fulfill charges directed by the Board. The code of ethics and
proce-dures for administration and termination of membership for violation of the
code, when prepared, shall be presented to the Board for approval and
modifi-cation, and the Board shall present the code and procedures for administration
to the membership for approval.
c. Education
and Compliance
Committee. The Education Committee shall be
responsible for education programs
and monitoring of continuing education
compliance
. The Committee shall submit, to the Board, recommendations for
the establishment of continuing education requirements; additionally, the
Com-mittee shall be responsible for the coordination of programs between the
Chap-ters and shall be responsible for aiding the ChapChap-ters in connection with local
education programs.
The Committee shall be responsible for obtaining and
maintaining any continuing education provider registrations as deemed
appropriate by the Board
.
d. Legislation Committee. The Committee shall review legislation and
regula-tions pertaining to the practices of the membership, and make
recommen-dations of action
recommend to the Board programs of action in relation to
legislation relevant to Accountancy.
e. Finance Committee. The Treasurer shall serve as Chairman of the Finance
Committee. This Committee shall aid the President or Executive Director,
when applicable, in the preparation and presentation to the Board of an annual
budget proposal and annual financial statement and in supervision of banking
and investment plans approved by the Board.
f. Liaison Committee. The Committee shall work with all individuals and
agen-cies at all levels with which Liaison may prove to be a benefit to the Society
and coordinate with all Chapters.
g. Strategic Planning Committee. The Committee shall formulate both short
-term and long-term goals for the society and make recommendations to
the Board.
ASPA BOARD OFFICERS
President
Jo Ann Sabbagh
520-867-8833
josabbagh@msn.com
Tucson Chapter
Vice President
Christine Freeland
480-899-6672
chris@christinezfreelandcpa.comEast Valley Chap/Seminar Chair,
Ethics Chair, NSA State Director
Treasurer
Nina Tross
480-545-0800
ntross@trossacctg.com
East Valley Chapter President,
Budget & Finance Chair
Secretary
Molano, Mary
602-568-3779
unicorntax1@cox.net
Phoenix Chapter, Newsletter Chair
Strategic Planning Chair
If I have missed or any thing is wrong with the above please e-mail the editor at unicorntax1@cox.net
ASPA Chapter Meetings
Cochise Chapter Inactive
East Valley Chapter 2nd Tuesday of the month For reservations or information call Nina Tross at 480-545-0800
Mohave Chapter Inactive
Northern Arizona Chapter For date and location of meetings call For reservations or information call Sherrill Clark at 928-445-4893
Phoenix Chapter 3rd Wednesday of the month For reservations or information call Leanna Griffin at 602-277-4008
Tucson Chapter For date and location of meetings call For reservations or information call Jo Ann Sabbagh at 520-867-8833
Verde Valley Chapter For date and location of meetings call For reservations and information contact Donna Gillespie at eee@npgcable.com or Fax 928-634-4106
Chapters meetings are a great place to meet practitioners in your area. Monthly meetings feature presentations on a wide range of topics from accounting to taxation issues and updates to planning and management within your firm. Take an Associate, Friend or Student with you to your Local Chapter Meetings.
It is with deepest regrets to inform you of the
pass-ing of Donald Schulz, a long time member from
Cochise County.
Page 5
The mission of the Accreditation
Council for Accountancy and
Taxation (ACAT) is to accredit
professionals who have
demon-strated knowledge of the
princi-ples, practices, and ethical standards of
account-ing, taxation, information technology and related
financial services in order to maintain the highest
level of service to the public; to promote the value,
recognition and use of the ACAT credentials; to
protect the ability to use the earned credential.
ACAT’s objectives are:
To raise professional standards and improve
the practices of accountancy and taxation.
To accredit persons with demonstrated
knowl-edge of the principles and practices of
accoun-tancy and taxation.
To encourage practitioners in a continuing
program of professional development.
To assure that accredited individuals provide
the highest degree of technical proficiency in
small and mid-size business and individual
accounting and taxation services.
To foster increased recognition for the
accred-ited individual in the public, private and
edu-cational sectors of our nation.
The Council is dedicated to the highest
profes-sional standards. Business, public, and
govern-ment rely upon the public accounting profession
more than ever for the complete and accurate
presentation of financial information, schedules
and reports, as well as judgment in business
mat-ters. Each individual accredited by the Council
accepts this responsibility, and pledges to abide by
the ACAT Code of Ethics.
The Arizona Society of Practicing Accountants would like to congratulate East
Valley Chapter member and State Board of Director Carolyn Brown for being
selected as the Regional and National SBA Women in Business Champion of
the Year. Carolyn’s awards were presented at the SBA Small Business Awards
on May 20, 2010 at the Enterprise Awards Luncheon, hosted by the Arizona
Small Business Association (
ASBA
) and the SBA, at the Arizona Biltmore in
Phoenix, Arizona. Congratulations once again Carolyn!
Have you moved? Need to update
your membership information?
C ont a ct AS P A ’s Ex e cut i ve
Secretary David Freeland at
NSA 65th Annual Meeting
NSA’s annual meeting will be held in Arlington, VA, August 18—21, 2010. Information about this year’s Annual Meeting is now online including a sched-ule-at-a-glance, CPE session informa-tion, hotel rates, registration packages, pre-conference EA, ATA and ATP courses, and social and special events. The early bird $100 registration discount ends July 1st. Earn up to 11 hours CPE at 12 different courses.
Membership
NSA and its affiliates represent more
than 30,000 independent practitioners who provide accounting, tax, auditing, financial and estate planning, and man-agement services to 19 million individu-als and businesses.
Education
Webinars
Webinars begin at 2:30pm EDT. Webi-nars run for one hour and participants earn one hour of CPE credit. Each webi-nar is interactive, allowing participants to ask questions by phone or e-mail. The cost for each webinar is
$35 for NSA members and $75 for non-members. Members who register for two webinars will also receive the third one free. For information and to register, call 1-800-966 -6679, e-mail mem-ber@nsacct.org or visit the NSA website for more information on subjects and dates.
Christine Z Freeland, Arizona State Director
480-899-6672
chris@christinezfreelandcpa.com NSA toll free 800-966-6679
www.nsacct.org
NSA H
APPENINGS
By
A
RIZONA
S
TATE
D
IRECTOR
C
HRISTINE
Z F
REELAND
President Signing HIRE Act Will
Have Immediate Impact
On March 18, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment (HIRE) Act of 2010 to help businesses hire and re-tain new employees. The so-called HIRE Act features a tax credit to en-courage businesses to hire workers who have been unemployed for at least 60 days, and an extension of the increased expensing limits for small businesses.
NSA members who have payroll or small business clients should pay par-ticular attention to the provisions of the Act because of its immediate impact. Why? Consider the following:
Payroll Tax Forgiveness for Hiring Unemployed Workers
Employers who hire unemployed work-ers this year (after Feb. 3, 2010 and before Jan. 1, 2011) may qualify for a 6.2-percent payroll tax incentive, in effect exempting them from their share of Social Security taxes on wages paid to these workers after the date of en-actment. This provision is in effect
NOW. The IRS wants to remind every-one that this reduced tax withholding
will have no effect on the employee’s
future Social Security benefits, and
employers would still need to withhold
the employee’s 6.2-percent share of Social Security taxes, as well as in-come taxes. The employer and
em-ployee’s shares of Medicare taxes
would also still apply to these wages. Eligible employers will be able to claim the new tax incentive on their revised employment tax form for the second quarter of 2010. Revised forms and further details will be available from the IRS in the next few weeks.
The HIRE Act requires that the em-ployer get a statement from each new hire certifying that he or she was un-employed during the 60 days before beginning work or, alternatively, worked fewer than a total of 40 hours for someone else during the 60-day period. The IRS is currently developing a form employees can use to make the required statement. This form will be available in the near future.
Readers should note that this provision applies to businesses, agricultural em-ployers, tax-exempt organizations and public colleges and universities, but no household employers can claim this new tax benefit. In addition, because the Act is intended to increase employ-ment, this provision will not apply to a worker hired to replace another
em-ployee of the employer unless such employee separated from employment voluntarily or for cause. To prevent abuse, the provision also does not ap-ply to a new employee who is a related party of the employer (as defined un-der rules similar to sec. 51(i) of the Code.
Business Credit for Retention of Certain Newly Hired Individuals in 2010
The Act provides that an employer's general business credit is increased by $1,000 for each retained worker that satisfies a minimum employment pe-riod. Generally, a retained worker is an individual whose hiring is subject to the payroll tax forgiveness provision, above. However, the technical expla-nation of the credit states that it is available only with respect to such an individual, if the individual:
is employed by the employer on any date during the taxable year;
continues to be employed by the em-ployer for a period of not less than 52 consecutive weeks; and receives wages for such employment during the last 26 weeks of such period that are at least 80-percent of such wages dur-ing the first 26 weeks of such period.
Continued at More NSA Happening
next page.
Page 7
President Signing HIRE Act Will
Have Immediate Impact (cont.)
For readers who may already be won-dering, the portion of the general busi-ness credit attributable to the retention credit may not be carried back to a taxable year that begins prior to the date of enactment of this provision. Increase in Expensing of Certain Depreciable Business Assets
The Act extends the higher limits for Section 179 small business expensing through 2010, allowing small busi-nesses to deduct up to $250,000 from taxable income, but the value is de-creased by the amount by which the cost of qualifying property placed in s e r v i c e e x c e e d s $ 8 0 0 , 0 0 0 . The technical explanation of these pro-visions may be found at: http:// w w w . j c t . g o v / p u b l i c a t i o n s . h t m l ? func=startdown&id=3648
Reprinted: NSAlert March 19, 2010
CPE for Tax Return Preparers:
The Rules They Are A’Changing
N S A
h a s
learned that the
IRS intends to
issue new rules
under Circular
230 to modify
the CPE rules
for tax preparers. The new rules,
which are expected to be issued this
summer, will eliminate the IRS
spon-sor designation and provide new rules
under which an organization or
speaker may have specific courses
recognized by IRS for CPE purposes.
IRS officials have told NSA that the
current rules are not adequate to
en-sure that courses marketed as
provid-ing quality tax education actually do
so. With the registration of an entirely
new group of preparers, all of whom
will claim they are registered/
authorized by the IRS to preparer
re-turns, the IRS believed
it important to ensure
these newly registered
folks receive education
that will actually help
make them better
pre-parers. Preparers will be
required to complete 15
hours of continuing
edu-cation annually under
the new requirements
for registered preparers.
Each year, two of those hours will
need to be ethics training, and four
hours will be tax law updates.
NSA members should know that all of
the webinars and live education
of-fered by NSA is recognized as quality
education by the National Association
of State Boards of Accountancy and
by the IRS and we are committed to
maintaining that high standard in the
future.
The Rules They Are NOT
A’Changing Quite That Much
NSA has seen a number of claims
about the new tax preparer regulation
rules that, uh, do not have the
advan-tage of being true. Among these is
that preparers must earn an EA to
avoid possible restrictions on their
preparation privileges.
A large number of NSA
members are EAs and we
appreciate their
commit-ment in earning this
cre-dential. However, earning
this credential will not
somehow avoid restrictions
on preparation privileges
as compared with registering with the
IRS as an unenrolled preparer. EAs
and registered preparers will all have
to pay fees to the IRS and
obtain CPE but EAs have
to have more CPE in line
with their wider expertise
and representation abilities.
Both groups will be subject
to ethics requirements—as
they should be. Both
groups have to take and
pass a test but the EA
ex-amination is much more
difficult—as it should be.
For NSA’s part, there have been far
too many incompetent and
unscrupu-lous preparers until now, and it is time
to ensure that all preparers are
regis-tered and meet minimum standards.
Many current preparers are concerned
about the competency test and this has
surprised officials at the IRS. ―We
know we are not going to be testing
Rhodes Scholars,‖ said Karen
Haw-kins at a recent American Bar
Asso-ciation meeting, so the test will ―at a
very minimal level, be easy for any
competent preparer to pass.‖
Reprinted from :
NSAlert May 14,
2010
M
ORE
NSA H
APPENINGS
EAs and registered
preparers will all
have to pay fees to the
IRS and obtain CPE
but EAs have to have
more CPE in line
with their wider
ex-pertise and
represen-tation abilities.
Deadline
for submitting articles for
next issue
BASIC INCOME TAX CLASS
September - November 2010
Location to be determined
CCH FEDERAL TAX COURSE
(Big Book)
Starting in August
Prescott
Phoenix
Tucson
Board meeting schedule June 24, 2010
Rio Rico, Arizona
Leadership Training Luncheon
Time 11:30 am
Old Board
Time 3:00 pm
New Board
Time 4:30 pm
2010 Gear Up Tax Seminar Schedule
Gear Up Midyear Tax Update for Individuals
August 5, 2010—Tucson
Holiday Inn & Suites Tucson Airport North
4550 S Palo Verde Road Tucson, AZ 85714
Gear Up Assisting Small Business from A to Z ( New this year)
August 11, 2010—Phoenix
Embassy Suites Phoenix North
2577 West Greenway Road Phoenix, AZ 85023
Gear Up Business Entities
October 20-21, 2010 — Phoenix
Chandler Hilton
2929 W Frye Road Chandler, AZ 85224
Hotel Reservations 480-899-7400
Room Rate $109/night/Single or Double—Rate available until Sept 28
Gear Up 1040 Seminar and Ethics—first day only
November 17-18, 2010 — Tucson
Radisson Suites Tucson
6555 E Speedway Blvd Tucson, AZ 85710
Hotel Reservations 520-721-7100
Room Rate $99/night/Single or Double—Rate available until Oct 18
Gear Up 1040 Seminar and Ethics—first day only
December 1-2, 2010 — Phoenix
Mesa Hilton
1011 West Holmes Avenue Mesa, AZ 85210
Hotel Reservations 480-833-5555
Room Rate $109/night/Single or Double—Rate available until Oct 30
For more information on ASPA Seminars call 480-782-8872
JUNE ACCOUNTING SEMINAR
June 25—26, 2010 — Rio Rico
Seminar and Hotel information:
Esplendor Resort as Rio Rico, AZ
Rio Rico, AZ
Hotel Reservations Phone: 520-281-1901
Room Rate $94(plus $5 resort fee)
Web site www.esplendor-resort.com
For more information call 480-782-8872
Make sure you visit
http://aztaxandaccounting.org
Bookmark it today under
your Favorites List
Seminar Information
Seminar Registration Forms
ASPA Membership
Application
Hot Topics
Publications
Chapter Meeting Information
ASPA Contact Information
Links to Federal and State
Agencies
Link to NSA
ASPA Calendar
Look What You
Can Find On
ASPA’s website!
The opinions given by contributing au-thors are their own and are not necessarily the opinions of the ASPA State Board. This newsletter is supported in part by paid advertising from various local businesses. They believe our newsletter is a good value for their advertising dollars. Please show your sup-port of the advertisers in this newsletter by calling them first to fill your needs.
