Since the last one went so well, and since there have been many posts this week on my fellow accountant blogs that I’d like to highlight, here’s another quick round-up of three inter­esting nuggets:

Dan Meyer of Tick Marks talks about a new standard in the US called FIN 48, which requires companies making assump­tions regarding tax-related policies to document and disclose those assump­tions and provide a range of possible outcomes.

He asks the natural next question: “With IRS personnel theoret­i­cally able to look up these disclo­sures, will companies be less willing to take aggressive positions?” It’s a good question, and I think we know the answer! I wonder if the same type of standard will show up in Canadian GAAP before we converge with inter­na­tional standards. (Wonder how that conver­gence thing is going — haven’t heard much lately!)

The Detoured Economist comments on the trouble with being an accountant blogger — namely that we have all sorts of inter­esting things happen to us every day at client’s, but we’re bound by confi­den­tiality so we can’t share them. I completely agree, but there’s really no way around it.

In his words: “The problem is how to blog about inter­esting subject that come up over the course of the day without disclosing infor­mation about the entity I am auditing. Gener­al­ization about the field work…but they are less inter­esting then the nuts and bolts of actual occur­rences.” Amen to that, bro. It’s the nature of the beast.

Dennis Howlett gives some recog­nition to my fellow Toron­tonian and 2006 UFE passer, Krupo, for his post on increasing the minimum wage and how it hurts the very poor by reducing the total number of minimum wage jobs available.

This needs saying as frequently as possible until people realize that the minimum wage may help some people, but it won’t help them enough, and it will hurt those who need help more.