4 Key Cloud Computing Security Threats You Should Address

From both a specific user and a global standpoint, security threats associated with cloud computing can be simplified into three core elements: (1) Confidentiality, (2) Integrity, and (3) Availability. Recently, the Cloud Security Alliance (a not-for-profit organization with the mission to promote best practices for providing security assurance within the cloud), published “The Notorious Nine-Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2013,” including brief discussions of the implications, the relevant sections from the Organization’s controls structure and links to other provider topical articles. The nine cloud computing security threats they identified are…

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Why Your CPA Needs to Talk to Your Attorney

As I prepare myself for a presentation on the “Basics of Accounting for Lawyers” for the Practicing Law Institute in San Francisco in July, I am debating on how much detail to include in the talk. I suppose that if the attorneys know why and how we as accountants rely on their work, they would better understand our requests for information and its urgency during our audits…

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Doing the Books: When Do You Actually Need an Accountant?

You have an idea, so you work on it at night after the job that pays your current bills. You get some angel funding, so you quit your day job. You need to bounce your ideas off of someone else, so you hire an engineer to help you. You have an interested buyer, so you generate your first sale. You have more interested buyers, so you hire a salesman. All the while, the money comes in and goes out. At what point do you need to hire an accountant to keep up with the day to day bills instead of doing it yourself? When does it make sense to hire a general accountant to do it for you?…

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Beware: The Medical Device Excise Tax is in Effect & Compliance isn’t Simple

I recently got a chance to see the IRS in action. One of my clients manufacturers a medical device and is subject to the new medical device excise tax put into law as a component of the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The regulations associated with this 2.3% excise tax require companies to apply to the IRS to obtain a registration number and begin collecting the excise tax effective January 1, 2013. As this health care reform law has been around since 2010, the trade associations and industry groups have been getting the word out to their members regarding this new excise tax. However, even up to the end of December 2012, many industry groups thought there was hope that this excise tax would be repealed. The first step in…

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You’ve Heard of Escheat…But What Exactly Is It?

Simply put, escheat is a legal process whereby ownership of abandoned (or “unclaimed”) property is transferred to the State. All states have escheat laws and, while they have many similarities, the laws do vary. In California, businesses that hold unclaimed property are required to report to the State annually. Property of others is considered “unclaimed” and reportable after specific periods of time of inactivity (called “dormancy”), which is generally three years; however, wages and commissions are only one year. Some examples of property included in the escheat process are monetary assets such as…

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Curry, The New Flavor in Doing Business, Might Require a Second Helping of Audit

Seems like everywhere I look these days, there’s an article about key issues for US companies wanting to do business in India. And if that wasn’t enough, several of my clients now have a presence in India requiring me to once again get familiar with the nuances of Indian laws and regulations. While I leave it to the other experts to opine on organization structure, relevant labor and currency laws and tax considerations, such as in Journal of Accountancy’s March 2013 article, How to Do Business in India, I’d like to share my two cents (or ₹1.09 at current exchange rates) on how an Indian subsidiary (component) impacts the financial reporting for the group by the parent US company…

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An Auditor’s Parable

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans), English novelist, 1819-1880. She was working as an audit manager at a Big-4 firm in San Jose. One day a partner asked her if she would take a two-week assignment that required traveling to a Southeast Asia country as part of an international team, working with other auditors from the local country and from the UK. The Southeast Asia Company was a subsidiary of the U.S. client and was planning to file an offering on the London stock exchange…

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Another Painful Meeting….Sigh

If you’re like me, your days are filled with meetings, lunch appointments, and evening events. As I glance over my calendar for the next few weeks, I got to thinking, just what is it that makes a meeting productive and worth my time?…

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Using Benford’s Law to Detect Fraud

What is Benford’s Law? Given a large population of numbers, what percentage of the time would you predict each leading digit (1 through 9) would appear first in the list? After thinking through the ways this might be a trick question, most people would still guess that the probability for each would be close…about 11%. Well…apparently…

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Spring Cleaning for Better Fraud Prevention & Detection– Bleach it Before it Starts

Can your business use some spring cleaning in the area of fraud deterrence? First, don’t slip into complacency – it won’t to happen to you until it does. Small to mid-sized businesses are the most susceptible to fraud schemes, oftentimes from long-time, trusted employees. According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, a typical organization loses 5% of its revenues to fraud each year and the median loss for misappropriation fraud (i.e., theft) is $140,000, but one in five cases cause losses of a $1 million or more. It’s cheaper to spend time, effort, and money upfront on fraud prevention. Consider employing some of these fraud clean-up tips and techniques…

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