Are you shipping your product into Canada to Canadian customers? Are you considering expanding your marketing and sales efforts into Canada? Do your employees occasionally cross the Canadian border to sell your product? Are your employees providing services in Canada?
Few service professions carry an entry barrier as high as that of dental practices, due in great part to the need for high-tech equipment. However, some significant tax benefits are available that allow the astute dentist to greatly lower the net-of-tax cost.
In an effort to better assess the impact on regulatory capital and the regulators’ assessment of earnings of our banking clients of two new accounting standards, Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-01 Financial Instruments-Overall, and Accounting Standards Update No. 2016-02 – Leases (ASU 2016-01 and 2016-02), we recently spoke with personnel in the Boston and New York Regional FDIC offices.
After years of waiting and debating, the long awaited credit losses standard has finally been issued. The pronouncement introduces the idea of a new “Current Expected Credit Losses” model (affectionately known as “CECL”). CECL will impact the accounting and reporting related to financial assets reported at amortized cost (primarily loans and trades receivable) as well as debt securities and off-balance sheet credit exposure. However, the scope of this article is geared almost exclusively towards financial institutions and how the new standards relate to the allowance for loan losses.
At the end of nearly every recent year, Congress has been forced to address numerous tax “extenders” in its budget negotiations. Extenders describes a variety of temporary tax breaks which are set to expire at the end of a particular year unless Congress extends them or makes them permanent. Usually there are several dozen of these extenders set to expire, but the Protecting Americans from Tax Hikes Act of 2015 (“Path” Act), enacted late in 2015, pared the list significantly by making many extenders permanent.
Our Maine readers should be familiar with a tax-related ballot initiative they will face in a few weeks, and although much further down the road, a similar proposal is brewing in Massachusetts.
In July 2015, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) issued Accounting Standards Update (ASU) 2015-12, Plan Accounting: Defined Benefit Pension Plans (Topic 960), Defined Contribution Pension Plans (Topic 962), Health and Welfare Benefit Plans (Topic 965); (Part I) Fully Benefit-Responsive Investment Contracts, (Part II) Plan Investment Disclosures, (Part III) Measurement Date Practical Expedient.