In his recent blog post “Working with Sophisticated Valuation Clients,” Rand Curtiss (Loveman-Curtiss) wrote “during the last few years, the fastest-growing revenue source for my practice has been financial compliance reporting work (such as asset valuations for purchase price allocation and impairment testing). In many of these engagements Curtiss acts as a review appraiser.  He also noted in his blog post “Happy 2011: The New Estate and Gift Tax Law“ that “the equalization of the lifetime gift and estate tax exemptions at $5 million for 2011-2012 should generate a great deal of valuation work.

At the AICPA BV Conference last month, Ron Seigneur (Seigneur & Gustafson) remarked, “we’re seeing more commercial damages and forensic stuff instead of what we used to call the pure vanilla valuation case.”  Stacy Collins (Financial Research Associates) agrees that “the industries are harder to understand and the corporate organizations are daunting by themselves, and the cases seem to be getting more complex.”

Neil Beaton (Grant Thornton) sees a roll-up coming for the profession.  “The period of more new small practitioners may be ending,” he feels—agreeing with what Mike Crain (Financial Valuation Group) wrote about last month in the Journal of Accountancy.  And there’s another “freight train” coming—IFRS.   Working under FASB won’t be enough for the consolidated firms.

What are you noticing in the BV market?  Email BVWire to let us know!

Also, learn of other trends in the BV market in the upcoming BVR 2011 Firm Economics and Best Practices Survey, which contains specific practice management data from over 500 business valuation firms.