Got an employee who never takes a vacation? Does your controller always bring you invoices to sign at the end of the day on Fridays as you’re preparing to leave? Are your financial statements and bank reconciliations perpetually late? If so, you and your organization could be the victims of fraud. In the following article, Armanino Partners Jeff Stegner and Paul O’Grady discuss how to recognize the signs of fraud and how you’re organization can greatly reduce its risk of fraud with just a few simple organizational and process changes.

Lean manufacturing is nothing new — many manufacturers adopted this business model during the last decade. But did you know that lean accounting is crucial to operating in a lean manufacturing environment? Lean accounting focuses on two goals: 1) converting financial statements into “plain English,” and 2) eliminating waste by taking the focus off the minutiae.

In an economy where there’s no room for unnecessary expenditures or costly mistakes, many manufacturers are turning to the reverse audit to make sure they haven’t overpaid sales and use taxes.

There have been discussions about separate private company accounting standards for years. Now standard-setters may actually do something about it. The Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) — parent organization to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) — will soon decide whether to adopt recommendations made earlier this year by a blue-ribbon panel on standard setting for private companies.

Layoffs, hiring freezes, and pay and budget cuts were the go-to survival tactics during the economic downturn. In the midst of this downsizing frenzy, many manufacturers neglected to reassess their pricing strategy. Doing so can help companies remain profitable and competitive in good times and bad.

Just in time to prevent the country from defaulting on its financial obligations, Congress passed and the president signed the Budget Control Act of 2011. The act provides immediate relief from the debt ceiling (authorizing a $900 billion increase) and makes more than $900 billion in spending cuts over 10 years. It also prescribes expedited procedures for implementing another $1.5 trillion in deficit reductions, coupled with an additional increase in the debt ceiling of between $1.2 trillion and $1.5 trillion.

In an aggressive move to close the tax gap — the difference between tax owed and what is actually paid to the federal government — the IRS has increased its ranks significantly, hiring 1,500 additional new revenue officers who are busy auditing and collecting taxes it believes it is owed from businesses. In the following article, Armanino partners and tax experts Dan Jones and John Brychel give details and best practices to help your company minimize the time and cost of the dreaded IRS audit.

There’s no question that the struggling economy has had a negative impact on the value of many businesses and investments. But it also influences the business valuation process itself. Because economic conditions may affect the relative reliability of certain valuation methods and approaches, it’s important for you to discuss the potential implications with your valuation experts. In particular, the troubled economy has caused a recent accounting rule change — governing how “fair value” should be measured — to garner a lot of attention.

The implementation of the 403b audit requirement  placed a new focus on compliance, requiring all ERISA –covered plans with 100 or more eligible participants at the beginning of the plan year which file a form 5500 as a large plan to have an annual audit of their financial statements. The implementation of the audit requirement resulted in auditors focusing on areas of plan compliance that had never been tested before. This detail review calls for corrective action to be taken by both plan sponsors and plan administrators.