South-Western Federal Taxation 2010: Corporations, Partnerships, Estates and Trusts, Professional Version (with TaxCut® Tax Preparation Software ... Printed Access Card for 2010 Tax Titles) [Hardcover]

William H. Hoffman (Author), William A. Raabe (Author), James E. Smith (Author), David M. Maloney (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 23, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0324828632 | ISBN-13: 978-0324828634 | Edition: 33

Packed with new "Big Picture" tax scenarios and new "What-If?" case variations, SOUTH-WESTERN FEDERAL TAXATION 2010: CORPORATIONS, PARTNERSHIPS, ESTATES & TRUSTS remains the most effective text for helping you master complex tax concepts and the ever-changing tax legislation. Renowned for its accessible, comprehensive, and time-tested presentation, the text provides thorough coverage of C Corporations, Flow-Through Entities, Family Tax Planning, and more, while highlighting materials of critical interest to the tax practitioner. Preparing you for the long term, CORPORATIONS, PARTNERSHIPS, ESTATES & TRUSTS offers many opportunities to sharpen critical-thinking and writing skills. Internet exercises tied directly to chapter research cases give you hands-on experience using online resources to solve tax issues.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

William H. Hoffman, Jr., earned B.A. and J.D. degrees from the University of Michigan and M.B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from The University of Texas. He is a licensed CPA and attorney in Texas. His teaching experience includes: The University of Texas (1957-1961), Louisiana State University (1961-1967), and the University of Houston (1967-1999). Professor Hoffman has addressed many tax institutes and conferences and has published extensively in academic and professional journals. His articles appear in The Journal of Taxation, The Tax Adviser, Taxes--TheTax Magazine, The Journal of Accountancy, The Accounting Review, and Taxation for Accountants.

William A. Raabe, Ph.D., CPA, teaches graduate tax courses at the Fisher College of Business of The Ohio State University, and at the Capital University (OH) Law School. He is a leader among business school tax faculty in incorporating developments in technology into curricula for the educational development of tax professionals. Dr. Raabe’s teaching and research interests focus on Multijurisdictional taxation and financial planning, and he is recognized as the leader among business school academics in the fields of state and local income, sales, and property taxation. Dr. Raabe is the author or editor of approximately twenty books, including South-Western Federal Taxation, Schedule M-3 Compliance, and the Multistate Corporate Tax Guide. He has received university-wide recognition as the winner of the AMOCO Foundation Award for Teaching Excellence, and the Wisconsin Institute of CPAs named him the Educator of the Year.

James E. Smith is the John S. Quinn Professor of Accounting at the College of William and Mary. He has been a member of the accounting faculty for over 30 years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona. Professor Smith has served as a discussion leader for Continuing Professional Education programs for the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), Federal Tax Workshops, and various state CPA societies. He has conducted programs in more than 40 states for about 25,000 CPAs. He has been the recipient of the AICPA's Outstanding Discussion Leader Award and the American Taxation Association/Arthur Andersen Teaching Innovation Award. Among his other awards are the Virginia Society of CPAs' Outstanding Accounting Educator Award and the James Madison University's Outstanding Accounting Educator Award. He was the president of the Administrators of Accounting Programs Group (AAPG) in 1991-1992. He was the faculty adviser for the William and Mary teams that received first place in the Andersen Tax Challenge in 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, and 2001, and in the Deloitte Tax Case Study Competition in 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.

David M. Maloney, Ph.D., CPA, is the Carman G. Blough Professor of Accounting at the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. He completed his undergraduate work at the University of Richmond and his graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since joining the Virginia faculty in January 1984, Professor Maloney has taught Federal taxation in the graduate and undergraduate programs, and has received major research grants from the Ernst & Young and KPMG Foundations. In addition, his work has been published in numerous professional journals, including JOURNAL OF TAXATION, THE TAX ADVISER, TAX NOTES, CORPORATE TAXATION, ACCOUNTING HORIZONS, JOURNAL OF TAXATION OF INVESTMENTS, and JOURNAL OF ACCOUNTANCY. He is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Accounting Association and the American Taxation Association.

Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: South-Western College/West; 33 edition (April 23, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0324828632
• ISBN-13: 978-0324828634
• Product Dimensions: 11.1 x 8.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #652,084 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Terrible reader unfriendliness, April 5, 2010

By 

K. jung (VA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: South-Western Federal Taxation 2010: Corporations, Partnerships, Estates and Trusts, Professional Version (Book Only) (Hardcover)

In summary, the book uses unnessarily confusing style, seemingly assumes the reader knows the subject already and does not provide computation formula or details to solve the problems behind the chapters.

"Eater of books" has suggested others to buy buy "Income Tax Fundamentals" by Whittenburg and Altus-Buller instead.

I had a terrible experience with this book.

The author does not use plain English or reader-friendly style to explain the subject. I often found that author's long sentences unnessarily caused confusion and awkwardness. The book gave me an impression that the author favors long sentence just for the sake of it without consideration of unnessary confusion and awkwardness readers will experience. The explanation in this book was as if the author is expecting readers know the subject already. Sometime the book describes the material in detail while other times not without explaning what kinds of details matter and do not matter. I highly doubt that there is an editor who make sure the book is reader friendly.

Besides the reader-unfriendliness of this book, I found that the questions behind the book ask things not covered in the book. When the questions were covered in the book, they were still most of the time very difficult to answer because of the lack of explanations in the chapters to deal with the details. As I mentioned above, the book seldom explains what types of details matter and do not matter. On top of that, the details mentioned in the book often time have arbitrary link between each other because of the nature of the law. Thus while I was solving problems I found myself guessing a lot, helplessly striving to find meaningful link or pattern that might help me to "guess" right. Instead of reviewing the things covered to make sure I understand them correctly, it seems the questions were designed to make readers learn new things with time-consuming extra research not to mention whether one will find one ever. I remember I had more questions in my head after "solving" the problems with a lot of meaningless guessing than before "solving" them. Instructors should not expect students to solve the questions without an access to the answer manual.

It is a common sense that people buy a course book, instead of doing self-research, to learn new things in an organized way and more time efficient way. I question this book if it has achieved any one of these.

Here is more in-depth reviews from other people I sympathize with.

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This books is a disservice to those trying to learn federal income tax. This is a book on tax law, not on how to prepare individual tax returns or to prepare for the CPA exam. In short, save your money and buy "Income Tax Fundamentals" by Whittenburg and Altus-Buller. For comparison, when discussing medical expense deductions, this book splits the dicussion into two chapters seven chapters apart and never states the formula. Income Tax Fundamentals has as the last sentence of the first paragraph "here's the formula to calculate".

Also in the South-Western book you will never see a 1040 or any of the supporting schedules because it is about tax LAW. In the Whittenburg book EVERY chapter shows you the forms and explains how to fill them out in detail and how to calculate the amounts because it is a tax ACCOUNTING textbook.

Here's brief list of issues I had with this book

- It is completely lacking in clarity because it never walks thr reader through how to do the tasks, it provides an illustrative situation, states the amount of tax owed and moves on. There is no step-by-step as to how the answer was derived or how you could do it yourself. This leaves you blindly mixing and matching numbers to try to figure out how to reproduce the result.

- the text frequently makes assertions in the examples that are not supported by the text leading to the example (in some cases, the example can be explained by information several pages later -- where the example SHOULD have occured

- it will provide lists of exceptions or rules, but then not explain what they mean. For instance when discussing Hobby Losses, the book states 9 rules to determine whether an activity is a hobby or a business, but doesn't inform the reader which would apply: "The expertise of the taxpayer" would that make it a hobby or a business? The book doesn't say. "The expectation that the assets will increase in value" Again, does that make it a hobby or a business?

- When discussing the restrictions on deductions for transactions between related parties, it covers Losses, Unpaid Expenses and Interest and THEN at the end defines what "related parties" means!

- It does next to nothing to inform the student HOW to do much of anything; it simply states what the rules are and moves on

- frequently it uses BUSINESS examples throughout the text instead of individual examples (this has lead to extreme confusion in the class over a test question where students, who had taken taxation of corporations, got the question wrong). Although many individual filers have private businesses, the book provides as an example whether "Blackbird Airlines" a non-private company can deduct the cost of its federally mandated engine tests!

It goes on like this for 800+ pages. It's unconscionable!

If this text is required in your class, write up a formal complaint to your school (I am documenting the flaws I have found and including page numbers), and during the class review share your thoughts on the text.

This book is a waste of time and trees!

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This is yet another book from Hoffman and South Western publishing on tax LAW, not tax ACCOUNTING. This book is good for advanced coverage of corporate tax accounting, its use as an introduction to corporate tax accounting is a crime. It never tells you how to prepare a tax return, you never are asked to fill out any forms, it never instructs you how to calculate the taxes or provide walkthrough examples of the same.

This is not a taxation of corporations and partnerships 101 book, which is what a lot of colleges seem to be using it for, this is a book on corporate tax LAW for people who already know how to calculate the taxes and fill out the forms (what I need to know and paid to learn). This is 301 material "Advanced corporate tax accounting theory".

Here's a "problem" assigned to me from the book. "locate the following tax services in your library and indicate the name of the publisher and whether the service is organized by topic or by Code Section". No, I will not waste my time this way. This teaches me nothing about how to calculate the taxes and fill out the forms.

When you do get to problems that ask you to calculate the taxes you'll be dumbfounded since there is no place in the book that walks you through how to actually do it. Rather you have to surmise how it might be done from examples. So instead of building your skills, you spend most of your time mixing and matching numbers to try to find out how they were combined in the example to arrive at the answer and then applying that haphazard approach to your homework.

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I had to buy this text book for a college taxation class. Initially I thought this book was ok. But, then I tried actually reading it and realized this book wasn't written with too much care in terms of presenting information in a logical sequence or in an understandable way.

I often would have to go to websites to get the kind of understandable explanation that this book should have given. Its written in a really choppy style and often is too vague or general without fully explaning things.

This book needs some serious editing for readability, but then again text book companies don't generally care about making the content easily digestable. Teh just want to make sure the author has a Phd.

This book was great, if you like reading books the seem to have been written by robots.

I would definitely not buy this book unless it is required for a class. If you just want to understand the US tax code and how to file your taxes definitely look elsewhere. IRS publications are way more helpful and also are free.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Needed for class, December 9, 2010

By 

Susan - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: South-Western Federal Taxation 2010: Corporations, Partnerships, Estates and Trusts, Professional Version (Book Only) (Hardcover)

Needed this text for college course and it was shipped fine. The material in the book is very dense. Which makes each chapter contain a lot of information. I also found instead of writing about it in the chapter uses examples over and over. If you learn from examples then you will enjoy this book. For me I would prefer to be taught the material by reading it, and then maybe an example of that concept in the book. This showed concepts in the examples without explaining them well, or not explaining them at all. In fact, every page had at last one example piece and maybe two or three. It also had concept summary boxes. They showed the concepts in chart forms mainly, and again not an explaination of what you are seeing. Since this was the required Textbook then I give it five stars for being the book I needed. I would never purchase this book to learn this material without needing it for college, because it is difficult to get through all the material without a college lecture to accompany it. I made it through the class with the book and a lot of information on the internet about the questions and answers for homework problems from this book - which was helpful completing my homework assignments.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Deal, June 6, 2010

By 

V. J. Lloyd - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: South-Western Federal Taxation 2010: Corporations, Partnerships, Estates and Trusts, Professional Version (Book Only) (Hardcover)

Everythin you need to know about taxes. Not intended as a book on tax law.