Looking Forward to 2010 …

By Joelyn Carr-Fingerle, CPA

… but first a quick look at the rest of 2009.

December in our chapter means Tax Night! This year we are pleased to have Noelle Allen provide highlights in an hour-long presentation Dec. 15 at McNamara’s Steak House in Dublin. Please join us. We will host a new-member orientation before the dinner for all of you who would like to find out more about our chapter and CalCPA.

Please join the Young and Emerging Professionals Group’s annual ice skating party Dec. 17 in Walnut Creek. Bring your ice skates or rent them on site to this fun evening, which is preceded by drinks and munchies so you will have the energy and stamina to tackle the ice. No ice hockey moves are required, and for those of you (us) who are California born and bred—and who never learned how to ice skate—you won’t be threatened or intimidated. You can hang on to a rail all the way around the rink if need be.

This month we host technical meetings galore and provide last-minute tax planning information for both you and your clients. Also, please take a look at the slate of officers and board members for the 2010–11 year as proposed by the Nominations Committee. Nominations from the chapter membership as a whole are open and must be received by Tuesday, Dec. 21. Fifteen members or more may nominate a candidate for chapter board officer or director, and consent of nominees must be obtained before forwarding their name.

We will vote by written ballot in January and announce the results at our Jan. 28 meeting.

I trust that by now you all have your 2010 calendars. Please mark the important date of Wednesday, Jan. 20, to join us in Sacramento for CPA Day at the Capitol. We are coming off a year in which we had four bills critical to the CPA profession passed and signed by the governor. Our work is not done yet, however, and critical legislation still faces us.

CalCPA Government Relations Director Bruce Allen and others will let us know what we need to tell our legislators during our visit, and then we will answer our representatives’ questions based on our own experience, something that our wonderful lobbying staff cannot do for us. This requires that we take the time to talk directly to our legislators and their staff about our real-world situations—what we and our clients have actually seen, heard and experienced.

January is a great time to go to Sacramento because we are not competing for our representatives’ attention with other groups, and it’s before most of us get too involved in our busy seasons. We need all ages and member types to attend. Please sign up. If we receive enough interest, we can pull together carpooling or maybe even a bus, but we need to know sooner rather than later if you are interested. Please contact me or Tom Parry, our grassroots legislative coordinator.

The California Board of Accountancy is expected to enact a change in CPE regulations and has sent out some publicity on this topic. First off, do get signed up with the CBA to receive its e-mail notices. This registration is free and easy, and keeps you current. Effective Jan. 1, 2010, all active licensees will need to fulfill four to six hours of ethics CPE every renewal period, not just every third renewal period, as has been required in the past. So, if you renew early in the year, make sure you have the necessary ethics hours. Those of you with early 2010 renewal dates may need to start scrambling for those ethics classes right now, since these classes are not always offered at the drop of a hat. All of the current eight-hour classes are said to qualify. You just need to find one if it wasn’t already in your CPE year plan for the renewal ending in 2010.

You can find more information on CalCPA’s website and online at the CBA.

Also, a heads up: mandatory peer review is here for California! If you aren’t an AICPA member and haven’t been subject to peer review, you are now subject to it, and the first reports are due by July 2011. You may want to start getting yourself set up for this process now, since many more practitioners will be searching to find qualified reviewers. You cannot leave it to the last minute. The process takes time. Find more information, including FAQs, at CalCPA.org.

Have a wonderful, relaxing holiday season. I hope to see you at Tax Night, ice skating or some other chapter function in December.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.