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Two Indian chartered accountants have been barred from associating with a registered public accounting firm while a third has had his audit activities sharply limited for two years. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has taken the action against three partners of P. Parikh & Associates and has revoked the registration of the Mumbai, India-based company, while imposing a civil money penalty of $10,000 on the firm.

CCH is going to the web with a broad-based suite of tax and accounting applications under the name, Axcess. The company's desktop products will continue to be marketed under the ProSystem fx name. But Axcess covers the full line of cloud-based applications. And while CCH had a SaaS line on the market, this introduction appears to mark a much more aggressive move onto that platform.

Xero has released Workpapers, based on the product of a cloud-based company it purchased last year, into the New Zealand and Australian markets. But the New Zealand-based organization isn't keeping the online workpaper product in the Southern Hemisphere. It will bring the product to the United States, although an exact date has not been announced.

Income from the tax refund business of Republic Bancorp plunged for the first quarter ended March 31. The company last year was the last bank to offer Refund Anticipation Loans. This year, it reported the loss of two retail tax chains that had been represented more than half of its refund transfer volume were factors as refund fee income dropped to just over $12 million for the most recently ended quarter, down from $71.7 million a year earlier.