PCAOB Founding Member Daniel Goelzer Reflects on Board’s History and Future [AT]
Q: What’s your sense of the image of the PCAOB among accountants? Is it seen as something to be feared or something to be relied upon to set needed standards and do the work of inspecting the firms, keeping them honest? A: I think the profession does have a lot of respect for us. I think that was one of the challenges in setting the board up and getting it going, whether we would be able to attract a high-quality inspection staff, that the people inspecting them, primarily the big firms now, would regard as peers and people they would take seriously, or whether they would be dismissive of us and not take our inspections seriously. I think we’ve succeeded spectacularly well in creating a staff that the profession does respect.
Congress’ potential faulty tax logic [Reuters]
DCJ: "If the corporate tax rate is cut, should the rates for dividends and long-term capital gains be increased? That issue was inadvertently put on the table by a leading free market organization, the American Enterprise Institute. The AEI, as part of its support for cutting the corporate tax, promoted the idea last month that workers, not investors, bear the burden of that tax. In taking that line, however, the AEI has undercut its own argument for tax relief for investors. Indeed, it shifts the debate toward higher taxes on capital gains and dividends and lower taxes on wages."
San Diego man accused of trying to hire hitman in tax case [LAT]
Former IRS revenue agent Steven Martinez allegedly was going to spend $100k to knock off two witnesses in his tax fraud case.
Looks are important to the Grumpies: "EBITDA is not value relevant. There is no economic theory that links EBITDA to the value of the firm. Yes, there are some models that claim to do this, but they adjust EBITDA for the missing items we note above, and in effect convert the measure either to operating income or to free cash flow. They still do not map EBITDA directly into value."
Namely Donald Driver and Melissa Gilbert.
