Every published comparison of CPA review courses has the same three problems. It is out of date within a season, it assumes there is a single best course rather than a best course for a particular candidate, and it is usually written by someone with a commercial interest in the answer.

So this post does something more useful: it tells you which dimensions actually affect whether you pass, and gives you a two-hour test that will tell you more about a ...

The honest answer to "is it worth it" depends entirely on one question: do you already know how to prepare tax returns?

If you do, this program is largely paying for knowledge you have. If you do not, it is one of the more sensible structured routes into a field with a genuine shortage of competent preparers — and it is a route that does not require a degree, an examination administered by a regulatory body, or several years.

What it is not, and what people ...

Tax research has a structure that generative AI does not respect, and understanding the mismatch is the whole subject.

Tax research runs on an authority hierarchy. The statute governs. Regulations interpret it. Rulings, procedures, and other published guidance carry defined weight. Cases carry weight depending on the court and the jurisdiction. Secondary sources — treatises, journals, blog posts — carry none, though they are useful for finding the authority that ...

Fringe benefit questions arrive constantly and clients ask them backwards. "Is this taxable?" invites a search for a rule making it taxable, and no such rule exists for most items.

The default is that everything is taxable. Compensation for services, in any form — cash, property, services, or the use of property — is includible in the employee's income unless a specific provision excludes it. So the analysis is always the same: which exclusion applies, and

Working capital is the most-computed and least-understood figure in financial analysis. Current assets minus current liabilities produces a number, the number is compared to last year, and almost nothing is learned.

The reason is that the level tells you very little and the composition and velocity tell you nearly everything. Two companies with identical working capital can be in entirely different condition — one holding cash and current receivables, the other ...

The October extended deadline is different in kind from the spring one, and firms that treat it as a smaller version of April get hurt.

The difference is that there is nothing after it. In April, a missing document produces an extension. In October, a missing document produces a decision — and the decision has to be made by the deadline, with imperfect information, by someone who has been working for nine months.

This post is about that ...

The Case Against Hourly, Stated Precisely

Four structural problems, in ascending order of importance.

It makes the client's cost unpredictable, which clients dislike more than they dislike the amount. A client who cannot forecast the fee delays calling, which is bad for both parties — the questions that would have been cheap to answer arrive as problems.

It penalizes expertise. The practitioner who recognizes the issue in twenty

The question in the title contains a category error worth fixing before anything else, because it is the most common misunderstanding in this area among otherwise well-informed advisors.

A cash balance plan is a defined benefit plan. It is a hybrid design within the defined benefit universe — a plan that states the participant's benefit as a hypothetical account balance rather than as a monthly annuity. Legally, for funding, actuarial, insurance, reporting, and ...