Professional Services Monitor: Today

According to Reuters and the AP, two current E&Y partners and two former partners have been indicted in federal court for tax shelters.

In an indictment filed in U.S. district court in Manhattan, prosecutors allege the defendants at the “Big Four” accounting firm created and marketed tax shelters from 1998 through 2004 based on false and fraudulent scenarios to allow wealthy individuals to reduce the federal taxes they would have to pay.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia said in a statement that the indictment targets “tax professionals whose deceit costs this country untold millions in tax revenues.”

Both articles noted that E&Y is cooperating with the government investigation and that the group in question has been dissolved. Little was given on the scope of the shelters or how they worked, other than that they were marketed to individuals with taxable incomes of $10 to $20 million. However, the Reuters article said that three of the four partners used a shelter for their personal taxes and, along with eight other E&Y partners, evaded $3.7 million in taxes.

Regardless, this doesn’t seem to of the same scale as the infamous KPMG shelter case.

NPR’s Morning Edition has a brief mention of a new Ernst & Young recruiting tactic, following Gen Y talent to Facebook.com.

“Generation Me.” That’s one term for a generation obsessed with affirmation, iPods and Blackberrys. Companies are doing whatever they can to pull them in. The consulting firm Ernst and Young hopes to hire more than 3,000 entry-level associates this year. So it set up a recruiting page on the social networking site Facebook, featuring video testimonials and blogs. More than six-thousand “friends” are signed up on the site. But the company warns its members to be careful to only post comments if its something they would say at work.

A frequent opening pleasantry on conference calls is often, “How’s weather there?” When someone learns that ARGI is located in the greater Seattle area, we regularly hear an anecdote of how rainy it was was on a quick business visit several Novembers ago, or how a cousin-in-law nearly drowned by looking up into the pouring Seattle sky. With a mixture of self-loathing and self-defense of our “secret” of life in the Pacific Northwest, we usually go along with the assumption that Seattle Is The Rainiest Place On Earth.

Now, the secret is out. A study summarized at LiveScience.com, Study Reveals Top 10 Wettest U.S. Cities, shows that Seattle isn’t even in the top ten.

Mobile, Alabama, actually topped a new list of soggiest cities, with more than 5 feet of rainfall annually, according to a study conducted by San Francisco-based WeatherBill, Inc.
The Southeast dominated the most rainy list, while the Pacific Northwest never enters the list until Olympia, Washington pops up at number 24.

A new conversation-starter is order.

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