an accountancy corporation

                                   

Member
American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants

• China posted its third straight record trade surplus in July, driven by a 23% jump in exports.

• E-passports: The U.S. has launched a new passport equipped with a chip that includes key personal information of the holder.  Congress also passed an act requiring countries in the U.S. visa-waivers program to issue passports with such chips by next month.  The e-passport will eventually become the U.S. standard.  The new passport looks similar to earlier passports.

• Why did Kamikaze pilots wear helmets?

• The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (commonly referred to as "SOX") was passed in the wake of corporate scandals like those of Enron and WorldCom. SOX requires publicly held companies to disclose in their financial reports any "material weaknesses" in their financial reporting systems.  Chief executives and chief financial officers also must certify that those reports are accurate.  Knowingly signing false reports carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.  Ensuring compliance with SOX has now become a big business as publicly traded companies must demonstrate that their accounting and financial systems are robust enough to guard against fraud and errors.  As a result, a new tech sector has sprung up to provide the software to accomplish that.  Estimates are that companies are spending some $8 billion this year on such compliance with a 22% growth annually.  "We keep CEOs out of jail," boasts a California software company which sells software designed to prevent employees from manipulating financial-system databases.  It had 10 customers before SOX.  Now it has 250. 

• For more of the Generalist, please visit our website at ARKCPA•COM.

• theGeneralist, a one-page monthly publication of the accounting firm of A. R. Kakhsaz Company, is in its 12th year of providing information, presented fairly and accurately, from sources we can depend upon and trust.

• What are the chances for a major overhaul of the U.S. tax system within the next two to three years?  "A long shot," answered 70% of tax specialists and economists.

• Compromise: The art of dividing a cake in such a way that everybody believes he got the biggest piece.

• The United States with 4% of the world's population, uses 25% of the world's oil.

• Man and dog: More than 370 bomb-sniffing dog teams now patrol 72 airports across the U.S.  That's an 86% increase since 2001.  And more are on the way.  The program has a $28 million budget including $1.2 million for training.  The dogs are mostly German shepherds, Labrador retrievers and Belgian Malinois. They must prove that they have strong hips and focused noses as they go through endless drills to sharpen their skills.  Nearly half of them will not qualify.  The program names each dog for someone killed on the September 11th.  The dogs are being trained to have zero failure rates.  There's no room for error in real world.  "They are not drug dogs they're bomb dogs," says the chief trainer. 

• Assisted-suicide law of the state of Oregon permitted 38 terminal patients to get lethal doses last year.  There were 37 in 2004 and a total of 246 since 1998.

• Only 20% of men still worked at age 65 or older in 2003 as compared with half in 1950.  For women, there was no change, the number was 10% both in 2003 and in 1950.

• We see more in numbers 

than just numbers...

Ali R. Kakhsaz, CPA, MAcc

www.arkpca.com