Most small business owners surveyed by the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems (NCPERS), a trade association for more than 500 public sector pension funds in the United States and Canada, want to provide their employees with some sort of retirement plan. In fact, 82% support the concept of a new retirement plan that would provide employees with a guaranteed monthly benefit for life after they leave the work world. What’s more, more than two-thirds say they would be interested in adopting such a plan for their own businesses, according to Employee Benefit News.

At the same time, just one in five small business owners surveyed offer employees a 401(k) or other employee self-funded retirement plan, a recent survey by Nationwide found. more

If you’re a CFO with a smaller company that’s about to undergo an IRS audit, you’ll want to take note of several statistics highlighted in a recent report, “Steps Can Be Taken to Enhance the Quality of Audits Involving Small Corporate Returns,” from the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

To determine the quality of the audits performed by IRS auditors, TIGTA researchers at the IRS’ Small Business/Self-Employed headquarters reviewed 51 audits – not a statistically valid sample, they acknowledge – from a universe of nearly 7,000 audits completed between August 2010 and May 2011. The inspectors uncovered potential quality concerns in 19, or 37%, of the audits. Many involved issues between the corporate return and other, related returns, such as those for employment taxes or a shareholder’s individual tax return. more

During the first quarter of 2012, a new Balance and Transaction Reporting Standard from SWIFT and X9 is scheduled for introduction, according to X9, the American National Standards Institute’s (ANSI) accredited standards developer for national financial services standards. The standard, which currently goes by its acronym, BTRS, “will streamline communications between banks and their corporate customers, thus eliminating processing errors, reducing risk and automating cash management functions,” according to X9.

BTRS replaces BAI Version 2, which many organizations relied on to receive information about the cash management and treasury services provided by their banks and other vendors. more

Until several years ago, all 175,000 or so corporate and pass-through tax returns received by the Kentucky Department of Revenue (DOR) each year were processed manually. As a result, reviews of the returns could lag by several years, says Sherman Nave, director of the division of corporation tax. What’s more, the department was able to capture only a small amount of information, and only from C-corporations; the information contained in returns of pass-through entities, such as partnerships and S-corporations, generally didn’t get reviewed.

That’s because given the massive amount of paper making its way through the office, reviewers were compelled to “only pick the low-hanging fruit,” says Michael Smith, senior director of business development with SourceHOV LLC, a provider of business process services, including document management and knowledge processing systems. more

In early November, the House passed H.R. 1965, which had been introduced in May. The bill, sponsored by Rep. James Himes (D-CT), would amend the 1934 Securities Act so that companies would not need to register their issuance of equity securities to be traded on an exchange unless they have at least $10 million in assets. Under current law, the threshold is $1 million for some issuers. In addition, the threshold for registration would begin with 2,000 shareholders if the issuer is a bank or bank holding company, and 500 if it is neither, according to the summary presented on GovTrack.us.

“This bill helps banks help growing businesses access the capital they need to expand and create jobs while maintaining important protections for investors,” Rep. Himes said in a statement. more