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Yesterday I was asked by the notorious hair stylist type to provide a letter to the bank that they are making more money this year than what they reported last year. I asked for $1000 retainer. Didn't hear back.

New client this year. Partnership that wants to elect S-Corp status. So far so good. I prepared the 2022 1065, K-1's etc and personal returns. They commended my on the job I did and want me to be their accountant/tax pro from now on. Okay, I'm still good. Last week they called and are trying to qualify to buy a new home but the lender wants to see they were making enough money being self-employed and asked me to write a letter stating they made more income than what was reported on their tax returns. No I'm not making this up. After recovering from the stupid question syndrome, I said excuse me but absolutely not!!! They tried to persuade me again with some BS logic and I quickly replied NO!! I wonder what kind of lender would accept a crap document like that??? I wanted to kindly say go to hell and go away. But instead I seized the moment they said they were okay with my answer but still wanted my assistance with the 2553 form. I told them I would email then with what they needed and what the fee would be to do so. $800.00 to $1500.00 apparently blew them away. Its been a week now and no replies. I mean really, what do some people think? What a good way to get disbarred and ruin a career.

Unless you are a cyber security professional, it's impossible to know what is secure anymore. All of the large businesses and government agencies that were hacked this month failed to keep their software updated. They were all using an outdated version of some File Transfer Software called MoveIt which allowed the Russian Hacker Group to access their important data. Even then they should have had multiple layers of encryption. Just because the software you're using hasn't been hacked yet doesn't mean it's secure.

Self encrypt the data before upload is also a good step. Then, if the storage itself is accessed, your data remains unusable unless someone also breaks your encryption. Try to be just a little more secure than your neighbors and the baddies will pass you for the easy score.

Read several in depth articles recently saying that this trend started over 20 years and that the professions leaders never took it seriously.

My husband is music director at a church that uses DropBox, but never for sensitive data. He got a message yesterday from Norton (maybe, whatever he has for security on his desktop here at home) that his DropBox password has been compromised. It's the same for all 3 church employees (him, admin, priest) but never any PII. They use it to send the bulletins to each other for proofreading, that kind of thing. I won't use DropBox for my biz.

I just went to the CSTC Summer Symposium and was heartened by the amount of young people there!

"In early June, sporadic but serious service disruptions plagued Microsoft’s flagship office suite — including the Outlook email and OneDrive file-sharing apps — and cloud computing platform. A shadowy hacktivist group claimed responsibility, saying it flooded the sites with junk traffic in distributed denial-of-service attacks. Initially reticent to name the cause, Microsoft has now disclosed that DDoS attacks by the murky upstart were indeed to blame." "On June 8, the computer security news site BleepingComputer.com reported that cloud-based OneDrive file-hosting was down globally for a time."

I would have just said that my professional liability insurance carrier won't let me write comfort letters.

Agree with mcbreck's response. I'd document the dates, times, conversations, and advice given.

Sales commissions are not a COGS, they are an operating expense and included on line 10. Now if they paid a percentage of revenue to a clearing firm, I consider that a COGS. For example if I'm an investment advisor clearing through Charles Schwab and Schwab takes 10% of my revenue and pays me the 90%, that's a COGS. Reality is that most probably don't include the 10% in their income or expenses because they never see it. They book the money coming in and ignore the expense in their accounting.

What claim would there be? I'm not responsible for their penalty and I certainly wouldn't make a claim for $350.