The Virginia Society of CPAs is holding a lobby day today at the General Assembly. The organization, founded in 1909, consists of more than 8,700 individuals – including me – who “actively work in public accounting, private industry, government agencies or in educational institutions.”
It’s that “actively work” part that kept me from participating in the lobby day today 😦
That’s not to say that I’m not following the legislative agenda of the organization, because I am. Thanks to Richmond Sunlight, I’m tracking the bills that affect my profession through the use of Photosynthesis. (My tracking page, which contains all of the bills that I’m following, can be viewed here.) At the top of my list, as always, is the conformity date bill. This year’s bill is HB614, which is currently in the House Finance Committee.
Part of the budget as proposed by former Governor Tim Kaine related specifically to the issue of conformity to the federal tax code and the conformity date:
Finally, Virginia will join 20 other states and deconform state taxes from the federal income tax deduction for domestic production activities allowed under § 199 of the federal tax code. In addition, we will propose moving the date of conformity to make it easier for taxpayers to file their taxes, and my budget proposal funds the recently enacted federal provision related to tax treatment of income for certain spouses of our military members.
Gov. McDonnell did not specifically address this in his speech last night. While I fully understand why Virginia decoupled from the Federal Tax code, it certainly would make my life a lot easier if the conformity date was automatic or, at the very least, if the bill to roll it forward was the first one taken up each session.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
I was going to ask “When is lawyers’ day at the General Assembly,” but then I remembered: EVERY day is lawyers’ day at the General Assembly!
😉
Ain’t that the truth!
Thought we might find accord on that!
With that many CPAs in Richmond today, can they crunch the budget mess for us?
I’m sure we could 🙂
Vivian, thanks for taking such an active interest in these professional issues and sharing the news about CPA Day on your blog! It was a great day.
We are certainly interested in a more permanent fix to conformity as well. Our bill (SB 179) would be a step toward more automatic conformity, advancing the conformity date forward two years to make it a prospective date rather than a retroactive date, as has been used in the past. We also urged legislators yesterday to pass the conformity bill as early as possible to avoid unnecessary problems for tax preparers. You may also be interested in our bill on pass-through entity penalties (SB 178).
We’ll keep you posted on http://www.vscpa.com and http://www.CPACafe.com!
Emily – I had skipped over SB178 and SB179, so thanks for those. Is there a list on the website of all of the bills the VSCPAs is tracking?
We haven’t posted our list of bills yet because we’re still working through all of them. We’re hoping to have at least a preliminary list available early next week.