General Article Archives
Beyond the Annual Budget: Why Electric Cooperatives Need to Start Planning in Scenarios
The Budget Is Not Dead. But It May Need a New Job. Every fall, a familiar ritual begins in electric cooperative finance departments across the country. Spreadsheets multiply. Department managers receive budget templates. Finance sends reminders. Managers send back questions. Finance sends the templates back because a column was missed. Someone discovers that a vehicle was budgeted twice. Someone else remembers a major project that somehow ...
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The Cooperative Accountant Fall 2026
The Fall 2026 issue of The Cooperative Accountant (TCA) has been released! Focusing on cooperative-related issues, such as accounting and auditing, finance, cooperative management, legal and regulatory issues and taxation, this journal has become widely recognized as the industry standard. NSAC members, please log into Connect to view or download the latest issue.
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As Boomers Retire, Pressure Mounts to Expose Employee Stock Buyback Obligations
A retirement plan that runs on company stock can turn into a company’s next liquidity crisis — and U.S. accounting rule-setters are weighing whether businesses should be forced to spell out the size and timing of those buyback bills. The issue centers on employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), a common way for private-company founders to sell their businesses to workers as they head for the exits. The pitch is easy to understand:
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The Case Where the Chicken Comes Before the Egg
George v. Commissioner, T.C. Memo. 2026‑10 (Feb. 3, 2026) is one of the most consequential cases in the agriculture industry in recent years with respect to the research and development (R&D) credit under IRC §41. The U.S. Tax Court made it clear that agricultural innovation does not need a lab coat to qualify for the R&D credit. Production based experimentation, whether in barns, fields, or poultry houses, can count when aimed at ...
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A Framework for Addressing Data Concerns for Cooperatives
INTRODUCTION Cooperatives accumulate tremendous volume of data in the performance of accounting processes. In today’s world, collecting data leads to inherent risks. Such risks include crimes from access to personal identifiable information (PII), commercial sabotage, ransomware, and a variety of other risks. In fact, there is a need to be concerned about losing physical control of that data with cloud services which increases the need ...
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