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Accounting News Roundup: Management Accountants and Creative Tax Arguments | 05.08.17

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Management accountants

I had no idea that International Management Accounting Day was on May 6th. Did the management accountants have to recognize the holiday by going into work?  That seems more likely than a management accountant march or a management accountant Derby party.

Anyway, if you weren’t aware of the holiday, then I’m sure most of you management accountants out there in Internetland can observe the holiday today by…working.

Creative tax arguments

Creative ideas are essential to successful tax planning, even if those creative ideas go beyond the range of plausibility sometimes.

Strip clubs, for reasons we won’t get into here, tend to stretch the bounds of creative financial ideas of all kinds. In the case of the Penthouse Executive Club in New York, it claimed:

its dancers are love doctors offering the same nontaxable services that a massage therapist or a sex shrink provides.

I understand the argument, and in certain contexts, it might be compelling, but finding a sympathetic taxing authority would be pretty difficult.

Accountants behaving badly

You’d think that with the high demand coupled with the (seemingly) short supply, there’d be little dissatisfaction about compensation among the accounting class. But life consists of human nature, not just economics, so every once in awhile, an accountant unhappy with her pay may take matters into her own hands.

That is what’s alleged in the case of Sarah Batenhorst of Lincoln, Neb. who was an accountant at the Nebraska Rural Electric Association:

Batenhorst adjusted account ledgers to increase her salary in 2014, 2015 and 2016 and adjusted printing rates charged to members for the magazine, Rural Electric Nebraskan, and used the added fees to pay her personal credit card.

Of course, it might be less trouble to find another job that pays better, but again, human nature’s worst tendencies play a role for some people.

Elsewhere, an ABB story out of Minnesota includes this sentence: “Police were initially tipped off when the CEO of the company reported a check missing,” and, sure, the CEO turned out to be right, something suspicious was going on, but hopefully none of your superiors are that impulsive.

Brought to you by Accountingfly

The featured job of the week was an Accounting Manager at ORBA.

Previously, on Going Concern…

Megan Lewczyk wrote about cyber espionage. Adrienne Gonzalez wrote about the state of recruiting and the talent shortage in accounting. In Open Items, someone is curious about “preferred” qualifications.

In other news:

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