Writing Homework Help

ACCT560 Instructions for Week 4 Research Paper

Choose a publicly traded corporation and locate its annual report. Review the notes accompanying the company’s financial statements and identify five different areas that may impact your chosen corporation’s taxes. In your paper you will label these areas A, B, C, D, and E.

For each of the five areas that you identify, you will need to address the series of six questions listed further below, and clearly label your responses as A1 through A6, B1 through B6, and so forth. When complete, your final work product should contain 30 responses (five identified areas x six questions addressed for each area).

Requirements

Begin your paper with a brief introduction clearly indicating the name of the publicly traded company you chose to research and provide a succinct description of its mission (i.e., explain what the company produces and sells or the service it provides to customers).

Questions to be Addressed

(For each of the five different areas that you’ve identified as having a potential impact on the selected company’s taxes, please address all of the following.)

• What is the specific note addressing this area, and what policies do the company have in place to address this item?
• What is the potential tax impact to the company of the policy(ies) they’ve chosen?
• What alternative choices does the company have as to how to treat this area, and how would these alternatives potentially impact net income?
• What is the relevant tax guidance that has been released by the IRS or FASB, and has it changed over the last 10 years? (At a minimum, check pre-TCJA and post-TCJA.)
• Would the tax impact to the company change if it were a different type of entity?
• What might an auditor specifically look for if this company was chosen for an IRS audit and this area was reviewed?

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Formatting

• Must be a minimum 1,500 words; maximum 2,500 words.
• Include a cover sheet and reference page (these are not included for the word count).
• Cite sources using APA guidelines.
• Include a short summary paragraph concluding your research findings.

Special Note
When you submit your research paper, it will automatically be reviewed for originality and color coded by Turnitin. To avoid losing points, please ensure that your paper is color coded as green, or even better, as blue. Colors other than green or blue can expect to lose points, and if there is little to no originality to your work (red or orange coded), you can expect to receive little to no points for your submission and might even subject yourself to an Academic Integrity violation.

The good news is that you can submit your paper, see the color code, and make revisions up to two times before the deadline. The third time you submit your paper is the last time it will be accepted, so plan on submitting your paper earlier in Week 4 so you’ll have enough time to resubmit if the color code is not acceptable.

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Additional Information
Some questions asked by students in previous classes include the following.

Question 1:

Where are we supposed to be looking for the areas that might impact a corporation’s taxes? For example, is this information contained in the notes accompanying the financial statements, or are we instead supposed to be looking for something on the balance sheet or income statement?

Answer:

Just look in the notes accompanying the financial statements, not at the financial statements.

Question 2:

I am unsure what counts as an “area” that meets the requirements for this paper. For example, would a change in accounting regulations that addresses when credit card revenue is to be recognized qualify as one of the five areas for this paper?

Answer:

Yes! That’s a good example. If the credit card revenue policy is changed so that revenue is recognized sooner or later, then taxes must be paid sooner or later. Remember, businesses pay taxes quarterly, so this could have a significant impact.

Policy changes (such as this example) make it easier to identify a tax impact. However, you might not be able to identify an actual change to a policy in your company’s notes to the financial statements. In that case, you must identify a policy that is in use, and discuss, for example, the impact of the company selecting that particular policy over an alternative one (example: FIFO versus LIFO inventory methods).