A Leading Culture Of The World 's Largest And Most Globally Coordinated Tax Practices

Publicly traded companies are subject to the reporting and disclosure requirements of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). The laws that govern the securities industry were established to provide transparency to investors, creditors and shareholders alike. According to Hoyle, Schaefer & Doupnik, (2015) there are seven major disclosure requirements, the first being a five-year summary of operations to encompass sales, assets, income from continuing operations. Followed by a description of business activities, a three year summary of industry segments to include foreign and domestic operations, a list of company directors and executives, quarterly market price of common stock for the last two years, restrictions on the company’s ability to continue paying dividends, and finally, an analysis of the company’s financial condition, changes in the conditions and results of operation.

Entity-wide disclosures are required under Accounting Standards Codification (ASC) 280-10-50-40 through 280-10-50-42. The disclosures are required because every corporation does not report information in a similar fashion, and the disclosures would provide comparability of the financial statements among entities. For example, if a corporation uses a geographic approach in its financial statements, disclosing certain information about the products or services sold will make comparability to other companies much easier. The disclosures will also help with comparability within an entity if they decide to choose another method of reporting operating segments in the future. There are three types of entity-wide disclosures; products and services, geographic areas, and/or major customers. Every public company has to comply with the disclosures, even if the company has one reportable segment. The only exception to the entity-wide disclosures is if it is impractical to provide the information, such as it would be extremely costly to the corporation, or if the “internal reporting systems are not capable of gathering financial information by product or service by geographic area.” A disclosure should be made when entity-wide disclosures are impractical.

In the article, “The US Tax System: Who Really Pays” by Stephen Moore, he justifies his belief that there is little to no correlation between economic mobility and equality. Moore delivers his reasoning by contradicting relatively popular statements where some are virtually untrue and others are merely common opposing viewpoints. However, in the end Moore concludes his argument with the belief that raising the taxes on the wealthy would not help the poor’s income mobility, which I support one hundred percent.

Prior to the ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment of the American Constitution, the majority of the income received by the federal government was through tariffs and excise taxation (Pollack, 2013). Tariffs are taxes “levied by governments on the value including freight and insurance of imported products (Tariffs and Import Fees, 2014)”. Excise taxes are “taxes paid when purchases are made on a specific good, such as gasoline (Excise Tax, 2014).” While the individual citizen did not incur wage taxation, through trickle-down economics, consumers often dealt with higher costs of goods as importers sought to recoup

Furthermore, the proposed ASU will impact all companies that report their financial statements under US GAAP. Some of the disclosure requirements are already part of the current Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure requirements, but some disclosure requirements will reveal new information about reporting entities. PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) (Spang and Suplee, 2016) warns that “companies should consider how the additional disclosures may be utilized and interpreted by various stakeholders. In addition, compiling the necessary information, particularly for multinational corporations, may be challenging and may require updates to systems, processes, and controls”. Therefore, the implementation of the new standards on the early stages may require additional financial resources from the business entities.

Recognition of the possible stance the IRS will take is the first step to evaluating whether the matter should be published as an addendum to the financial statements. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) made multiple changes on how a company needed to report and disclose relevant financial information to provide transparency to investors due to the birth of Sarbanes Oxley (SOX). Consequently, public companies’ management must reveal their knowledge of any current or potential financial concerns “that might materially affect their financial statements” on their annual 10-K and quarterly 10-Q filings (Chasen, 2015).

The tax system of the United States is as complicated as it gets. It is a system that has enough loopholes in which it benefits the wealthy over the less fortunate. The wealthiest people are especially aware of these loopholes so they take advantage of it and determine ways of cheating the system, instead of trying to make it fair for all different types of classes. With these tools to cheat the system, the middle-class and lower-class are more harshly penalized and hounded for their taxes than the wealthy - who get away with a lot more. All of this information and more is discussed in David Cay Johnston’s book Perfectly Legal. Johnston discusses how cheated the tax system really is and how just the lack of political backup can really cause

In 1990, the IRS commissioned a comprehensive nationwide survey of taxpayers to obtain their overall perception of its administration of the U.S. tax system. NPM related questions from this survey were re-asked to taxpayers to determine any potential changes in response patterns (VanDenburgh 2004, 2). Several questions were re-asked to allow for an assessment of differences between the 1990 responses and the 2004 responses during research by William M. VanDenburgh (2004).

– Consider whether any extra divulgences as required by IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements in connection to

The purpose of this research report is to understand of two important concepts from the Conceptual Framework for Financial Reporting----the objective of general purpose financial reporting and qualitative characteristics of useful financial information. In this report, Myer Holdings Ltd is as an example to describe these two concepts. This report includes the analysis on whether the disclosure of PPE from Myer Holdings Ltd meets the requirements of AASB 116, especially the requirements of objective

The Bannerman clause sets out to protect the auditors, intern one looks to see how this clause erodes the professional image of the accounting profession, while limiting the audit report to addresses. The Bannerman clause is a direct consequence of the court case between Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Bannerman Johnstone Maclay and Others (The Royal Bank of Scotland v Bannerman Johnstone Maclay and Others, [2002]). The firm APC LTD employed Bannerman as an auditor; Bannerman audited APC’s financials and prepared an audit report for the directors of APC, subsequently APC sent the audited financial statements to RBS. The financial reports and audit statement were used to secure loans to APC.

Confidentiality – This calls upon any professional accountant to ensure that they do not disclose the accounting information of one company to any unauthorized parties. Such information should only be disclosed if the professional or legal right is granted by the relevant authority. Information obtained from a company should therefore not be used for any personal benefit by a professional accountant (Nobes, 2015).

False – Information that is decision-useful to capital providers may also be useful to other users of financial reporting, who are not capital providers.

The reporting regime has worked very well in the UK. A key opportunity that we have noted is to encourage firms to fully accept the new reporting regime. We have seen an increase in investor confidence surrounding firms that

The article discusses that in 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in one case that omitted financial statement information altering a reasonable investor’s decision proves the material nature of the information. The article continues by describing that lower courts earlier ruled that all financial information whether material or not must have full disclosure in a company’s financial statements. The rejection of the lower courts’ ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court gives the investor the ability to focus on the aspects of the financial statements that are most important by allowing the elimination of minute details (Sauer 2007, 317-357). In essence, this ruling allows for the elimination of financial information below the determined materiality threshold unless otherwise required by the ruling of a regulatory body.