The straight line

If you are about to ask for a business loan, expect to deal with the issue of covenants — constraints lenders impose on your company to keep it operating within specified financial ratios and to prevent it from taking certain actions. These clauses are meant to help the lender mitigate risk and get its money back....

  The Federal Trade Commission estimates as many as 9 million Americans have their identities stolen every year. Although the security of personal data is a top priority of all types of entities, the IRS is especially vigilant, because tax-related identity theft is the most common form of reported identity theft. The number of identity theft...

We are seeing more use of non-qualified patronage from the regional cooperatives. Treatment of these allocations varies from client to client, firm to firm, etc. Even our decision may change as we see the regional indicate or demonstrate they intend to revolve the non-qualified patronage. For example, CoBank specifically indicates they have no intention of...

Government entities have been providing pension benefits to their employees for many years. The promise that pension benefit payments will be made to employees when they retire creates an accounting liability for the governmental entity. Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) Statement No. 68 requires the pension liability to be reported in the financial statements of governments...

Each year, Gardiner Thomsen CPAs offer two “Daniel Gardiner Memorial” scholarships in honor of my dad, founder of Gardiner Thomsen. The scholarship is awarded to this year’s graduates from Waukee High School whom plan to attend a post-secondary school and pursue a degree in accounting. The two candidates will each receive a scholarship in the amount of...

Accounting for mergers under the old accounting rules wasrelatively straightforward. To form the combined entity, the book values of the acquiring and acquired credit unions were added together. Beginning in January 2009, this “pooling of interests” accounting was replaced with the more complex “purchase accounting.” Under the purchase accounting rules, the acquired credit union and...