We just spoke about this through our town hall / professional issues updates in Maryland and our membership is very upset about this sneaky way of raising "revenue" by Congress. We are already on record in opposition of this as the Maryland Association of CPAs (ftp://www.macpa.org) with our congressional delegation and our members are prepared to help us write more letters if needed to get our legislators attention. This is a bad idea whose time has not come!

Great work, Heather! I enjoyed being with these energetic and talented young leaders! here is my post that recaps the resources I mentioned in my session http://cpa.tc/30e

Ed, Great post and appreciate the update and your work with us at MACPA to stay in top of these developments. As we discussed our members are at a peak level of frustration as indicated from my post Tax Season from Hell http://www.macpa.org/blog/3193/the-tax-season-from-hell and are gathering comments from our active tax groups on a google doc to sue for testimony before Congress and to use on our upcoming Hill visits. Thanks for sharing the work AICPA is doing and for your work on behalf of us all. Tom

First, great post and thanks for shout out, Eileen! As to Ted, you are correct that most of these bills do not include lawyers (legal services). Interesting when the argument for these taxes is the transition to a service economy. We had a major fight last year as they turned up in our Ways & Means Committee, which we soundly defeated (for the umpty squmpth time). The bigger issue was an internet tax (aka Amazon) was broadly interpreted to include the e-filing of taxes by CPAs and therefore a backdoor sales tax on services. We worked to get it amended out of the Governors' budget bill successfully. The Lt. Governor promised our members at CPA Day this year that we would not be seeing it this year, but of course he does not speak for the 188 legislators :) We are watching!

Right Stacie (about that Maryland thing!)! Great work capturing the story of the Digital CPA Conference on Storify and your points about twitter are spot on. I have lots of members who comment that they feel like they are attending conferences from afar when there is a robust tweet stream. This first time conference hit some records with the tweet volume - almost 1,500 tweets in three days - similar to many other national conferences (and our own MACPA Innovation Summit). Thanks for sharing! All the best for 2013!

Barry, Thanks for sharing these insights and updates on the major issues facing our Profession. Having just come back from Digital CPA, that is an exciting new area of opportunities for many CPAs. The developments in Private Company Standards at both FASB & AICPA (formerly OCBOA) will also create new ways for CPAs to help their small business clients, generational challenges along with retirements and succession issues will become mission critical in the next year or two. The fiscal cliff is and continues to be a major concern for CPAs in Maryland and the AICPA has taken a leadership position in helping educate Congress and the American people about our sustainability. Finally, I am reminded of a quote by Peter Drucker that said, "But a time of turbulence is also one of great opportunity for those who can understand, accept, and exploit the new realities." Thanks for helping to define the new and continuing "realities" of our Profession and all the best to you and the AICPA Team (and your families) in the coming new year!

Barry, Absolutely YES! I had a blog post awhile back where I say for CPAs, Big Data (and XBRL) is the new Plastics (referring to the scene in the graduate)! CPAs are uniquely qualified to lead the analysis and communication of "big data" and to help organizations make more data-driven decisions. Great post!