MFA’s Business Insights blog is growing in popularity, and we want to make the most of the insight and information we can share with you.  To give you the best delivery of this knowledge possible, we are going to step up the game with a couple of changes.

For MFA’s Business Insights readers who subscribe via email through Feedburner:

Beginning next week, subscribers will receive the upgraded version of MFA’s Business Insights, which will come from thepartners@mfa-cpa.com (you may want to add the email to your address book to avoid losing posts to spam filters). We will send you highlighted blog posts in a new format, and will have both an HTML and a text version available. If you prefer not to receive HTML, you can just click on the “Update Profile/Email Address” link at the bottom of the first issue and change your settings.  And while you are there, you can also check the “MFA Alerts & Insights”  box  to get timely tax and business alerts!

For MFA’s Business Insights readers who subscribe via RSS or visit the blog directly:

No changes are necessary! You are still welcome, however, to visit MFA’s home page and sign up for our Alerts & Insights if you are not already receiving them.

Regardless of how you receive Business Insights, we’d like to encourage more conversation in this space.  We hope you will visit and engage us directly by commenting on posts that you find interesting or that raise questions.  This will help us to understand what kind of content is most interesting to you and keep the conversation going.

Thanks as always for your readership!

During MFA’s annual Education Week this summer, we were lucky enough to get some time with Barry Melancon, President and CEO of the AICPA.  Barry shared a fascinating perspective that helped to draw the line between a high level, overarching outlook and the client work we conduct on a daily basis.  It was interesting to see that the discussion centered around issues that we often touch upon here in MFA’s Business Insights.

Much of the bird’s eye view centered around the nature of small and mid-sized enterprises and their role in the U.S.  We’ve seen a great many changes in the small business landscape, and Mr. Melancon was adamant that the focus on this segment continue to get stronger.  He noted that “In our society, small business is really the engine.  It makes up about 50% of our pre-recessionary GDP.  There are about 24 million private businesses (including work-at-home businesses), and about 16-17 thousand public companies.  It’s a huge part of our economy.”

Small businesses often fall out of the spotlight and struggle to have their viewpoints heard over the louder voices of large organizations. Certainly in this economic climate, the challenges encountered by small business owners run a wide berth, but our focus on reporting and compliance gives us a window into the difficulties of complying with regulations that aren’t necessarily written for that audience.  We’ve touched on this before in posts on XBRL, the FASB codification, Massachusetts privacy laws, and International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

The slow momentum towards IFRS was of key importance to Mr. Melancon.  He noted that:

There is a lot of concern around the country about the complexity of accounting standards for private companies, especially FIN48 and FIN46R…We believe it points to a problem that we have an increasing number of private company statements that are not complying with GAAP.  Doesn’t that start to conflict with the concept of generally accepted accounting principles?  Is that what we want, or should we have standards that are more tailored to private companies?

There is a likelihood that we’ll see some process that will create a different set of accounting standards.  IFRS gives us an opportunity to look at this…Just last week the International Accounting Standards Board issued IFRS for SMEs, and maybe that’s the answer for private companies.  Or we have to look at several other options to begin to have a process where appropriate standards are in place for private companies.  There are many different approaches, and this will be a critical issue to work out over the next 18-24 months.

Mr. Melancon also had some great clarifying comments about the ongoing Fair Value debate that centers on whether Fair Value should be adjusted to help correct plummeting company values. We’ve written both on the conflict and on the opportunity provided by the situation, and Mr. Melancon added some texture to the conversation when he said that:

Fair value accounting reports on what has happened but the underlying business decisions are what caused many of the issues we’ve experienced.  But FASB has still come under tremendous pressure to modify Fair Value in order to not exacerbate the situation.  They did modify the rules to some degree, although there’s still lobbying in Congress for FASB to go further.  This lobbying in Congress brought into question whether the government should set accounting standards; we believe completely in the independence of the standard setting process.

Such wide-ranging discussion was invigorating, especially as we work earnestly towards the light at the end of this recessionary tunnel.  It is clear that there will be significant changes in a number of areas, even if the tides take some time to rise.  We believe that out of difficult times will come a stronger, more flexible system that will benefit U.S. businesses and enable us as a country to innovate our way back to a position of leadership.

My inaugural blog for MFA has me thinking about transparency in business. After all, what is a corporate blog if not the embodiment of a transparent means of communication with one’s clients, colleagues, and interested stakeholders. Transparency has been, in part, facilitated by technology, and hence the birth of tools such as this blog. My goal each week is to use this tool, like so many of the technological tools before it, to deepen our relationship with MFA’s core constituencies and encourage open dialogues on a varying degree of subjects over time.

Like business in general, change is ever-present in public accounting. We must remain expert on technical financial reporting pronouncements that are continually evolving; we must continually demonstrate our expertise of complex federal, state and international tax laws; and we must have a solid understanding of the economic environment in which we all live and operate our businesses. One need look no further than to recent FASB actions to understand how the theme of transparency continues to pervade business. More and more, FASB projects are actively addressing the questions of fair value accounting, convergence of US accounting standards with international accounting standards, and simplification of the existing bodies of accounting knowledge – all great examples of how transparency in business and reporting continues to pervade every facet of what we do.

Having grown up in the 80s, my first introduction to the use of technology to speed up business was in the form of fax machines and so-called portable computers that probably weighed fifteen pounds without a modem or network access. Many enterprises did not have local area networks, the internet was barely known to most and the World Wide Web had yet to come into existence – I lived online in the limited world of AOL and couldn’t email someone unless they, too, were an AOL member.

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