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FASB will not be providing a last-minute reprieve on its lease accounting standard effective date, despite the concerns of financial statement preparers about the difficulty of implementing the new rules.

The lease accounting standard takes effect for public companies in 2019 and for most other entities in 2020. It is designed to provide investors with more information by bringing lease assets and obligations onto lessee balance sheets.

Preparers have had difficulty implementing the standard for several reasons:
• Locating all the lease contracts that exist throughout an organization and extracting the information needed from them has been a significant challenge for company finance and accounting staffs.

In most cases, the demolition of a structure to facilitate construction of a new building increases the land value. Not only does the cost of demolition increase the value of the land, but also the remaining basis of the building must be added to the land value at the time of demolition.

There are limited exceptions to this. Under section 280B of the U.S. Code, an abandonment loss that is unrelated to demolition is allowed. If a property owned by a taxpayer is deemed condemned due to latent defects, it may be abandoned. The taxpayer could then abandon the property and take an abandonment loss to avoid increasing the land value.

The Internal Revenue Service is reminding taxpayers Monday about a change under the new tax law that limits like-kind exchanges to exchanges of real estate and similar property.

Under last December’s tax overhaul, starting Jan. 1, 2018, any exchanges of personal or intangible property such as machinery, equipment, vehicles, artwork, collectibles, patents and other intellectual property generally won’t qualify for nonrecognition of gain or loss as like-kind exchanges. However, certain exchanges of mutual ditch, reservoir or irrigation stock will still be eligible.

Time is running out to start getting ready for the technology-transformed, new-world accounting profession that is evolving at an increasing pace.

What changes are coming? What steps should be taken to prepare? What should I be doing now? Is it too late?

As with all major evolutions, the change within accounting will not happen all at once, so it's not too late. However, the pace of change will continue to accelerate so you need to get moving so you don't fall behind. Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you are ready when the technology is.

The American Institute of CPAs' Financial Reporting Executive Committee has posted an early working draft of guidance on inventory valuation guidance, with a goal of eventually publishing a broader Business Combinations Accounting and Valuation Guide.

The goal of the guidance is to describe the various considerations for estimating the fair value of inventory, in keeping with a requirement from the Financial Accounting Standards Board that inventory acquired in a business combination should be recognized and measured at fair value as of the acquisition date. 

The Internal Revenue Service proposed regulations for a provision of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that limits the business interest expense deduction for some kinds of taxpayers.

Certain small businesses whose gross receipts are $25 million or less, along with certain trades or businesses, aren't subject to the limits under this part of the new tax law. 

For tax years starting after Dec. 31, 2017, the deduction for business interest expense is generally restricted to the sum of a taxpayer’s business interest income, 30 percent of adjusted taxable income and floor plan financing interest. Taxpayers will have to use a new tax form, Form 8990, Limitation on Business Interest Expense Under Section 163(j), to determine and report the deduction and the amount of disallowed business interest expense to carry forward to the following tax year. 

The IRS will raise most 2019 optional standard mileage rates used to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes. On Jan. 1, the rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be: 

The charitable rate is set by statute and remains unchanged. 

The IRS stressed that under reform, taxpayers cannot claim a miscellaneous itemized deduction for unreimbursed employee travel expenses, nor can they claim a deduction for moving expenses except for members of the Armed Forces on active duty moving under orders to a permanent change of station. 

During our time in Austin we introduced the new elected leadership team for 2018-19, they are as follows:

President, William Miller, CPA Electric Chapter
Vice President, Nick Mueting, CPA, CFE Mid-West Chapter
Secretary/Treasurer Dave Antoni, Capitol Chapter
Past President, Jeff Brandenburg, CPA, CFE Great Lakes Chapter
Executive Committee Member, Erik Gillam, Pacific Northwest Chapter
Executive Committee Member, April Graves, Texas Chapter

Directors
Jo Ann Fuller, South Atlantic Chapter
Emery Lewis, Mississippi Valley Chapter
Tucker Lemley, Electric Chapter
Christy Norton, CPA Far Western Chapter
Mark Feldman, Mississippi Valley Chapter
Michael Mayhew, CPA North Central Chapter
Lynn Smith, North Central Chapter
Eric Krienert, CPA Far Western Chapter
Kent Erhardt, Great Lakes Chapter
Jeff Krejdl, Mid-West Chapter

Express gratitude for any kind of feedback you receive, because it presents opportunities to improve. 

Traditional Performance evaluations are going extinct. The rapid pace of change in the modern business landscape has decreased the utility of formal, once-a-year reviews, which once loomed large over workers' careers and earnings. 

Most employees won't miss those dinosaurs, experts say, noting that younger workers especially crave more frequent feedback. They tend to be happier with the continuous performance review systems evolving to fill the void, which are "more frequent, more employee-centric, more coaching-in-nature conversations between manager and employees," says Anna Tavis, clinical associate professor of human capital management at New York University. 

FASB addressed an area of accounting that has long been a concern for private companies with the issuance of a standard designed to improve consolidation accounting for private companies. 

The standard-setting board also amended for all entities the guidance for determining whether a decision-making fee is a variable interest. 

The changes were published in Accounting Standards Update No. 2018-17, Consolidation (Topic 810): Targeted Improvements to Related Party Guidance for Variable Interest Entities. The standard is designed to reduce the cost and complexity of financial reporting associated with variable-interest entities (VIEs), which are organizations in which consolidation is not based on a majority of voting rights.