Regulatory Compliance & Standards
Accounting work structured around GAAP, IFRS, tax regulations, and the compliance requirements relevant to your industry and location.
U.S. Accounting and Compliance Requirements
Support is structured around applicable federal and state requirements, with filing and professional conclusions retained by the client or its licensed adviser.
United States
- U.S. GAAP and reporting conventions
- Federal tax workflow support
- State-level requirements as applicable
- Client and licensed-professional review
Our Approach to Compliance
As a growing company, here is where we honestly stand today:
- Confidentiality terms and access responsibilities agreed for each engagement
- Workflows aligned to the client’s U.S. reporting and compliance calendar
- Submission and sign-off remain with your licensed practitioner; we do not file or sign returns
- SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications are not currently held; confirm any certification requirements before evaluation.
A Preparation Provider Does Not Carry Your Compliance
A costly misunderstanding about outsourced accounting is assuming that delegating preparation also transfers the client's or firm's compliance responsibilities.
Compliance obligations do not transfer
When you outsource preparation, the obligation to file correctly and on time stays exactly where it was — with you and with your licensed practitioner. Nothing in an engagement with us changes who a tax authority holds responsible. What changes is whether the records behind the filing are ready, current and supportable. Any provider who implies they take on the obligation itself is describing something they cannot do.
The FTC Safeguards Rule stays with your firm too
Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the FTC Safeguards Rule (16 CFR Part 314) treats tax preparers and accounting firms as financial institutions and requires a written information security plan. Outsourcing preparation work does not move that obligation either, and no provider can hold it on your behalf. What a provider can reasonably supply is the documentation your own plan needs about this particular engagement: which systems are accessed and by whom, named individual accounts rather than shared credentials, the approved file-transfer and storage channels, the retention and deletion arrangement, and who to contact if something goes wrong. IRS Publication 4557 covers the taxpayer-data side of the same question. Settle these at onboarding, so the record exists before the first file moves rather than when someone asks you for it.
Which is why the sign-off line is drawn where it is
We do not hold IRS e-filing credentials or sign returns. Returns are prepared for your CPA or Enrolled Agent to review, sign and submit under their own credentials.
U.S. Compliance Boundaries
Accounstone focuses on accounting workflow support and does not present itself as a financial-services regulator or a substitute for a licensed professional.
What we can be held to
The scope in the engagement letter, the review points agreed at onboarding, and the state the records are in when your practitioner picks them up. Those are real commitments and they are the right ones to hold a preparation provider to. Ask a prospective provider which of the two categories their promises fall into — it separates the ones who have thought about it from the ones who have not.
Related service and data-handling information
CPA firms assessing an outsourced workflow can review the work scope separately from the information-handling requirements. These pages explain the preparation work Accounstone describes and the data-handling questions to settle before access is granted.
- Accounting production support for CPA firms — work types, reviewer responsibilities and provider due diligence.
- Tax preparation support — return workpapers and the professional review boundary.
- Data security and client data handling — access, working files, retention and incident-response questions.
Ask Us How We Handle Your Requirements
Tell us which obligations and reporting cycles govern your work, and we will explain how the engagement would be structured around them.
Tell Us Which Obligations Govern Your Work
We will describe how the engagement would be structured around them, and say plainly where the line is between our preparation and your practitioner's sign-off.