My notes, live, from Dr. William Lutz on The SEC’s Radical Disclosure Overhaul. (Disclaimer: The presentation represents the views of Dr. Lutz and not necessarily the views of the SEC.) He started off with a definition of “Information”: That which reduces uncertainty. (From Shannon and Weaver’s Mathematical Theory of Communication) If it’s not information, it’s [...]
Archive | Accounting RSS feed for this section
Supreme Court to Rule on Sarbanes-Oxley
On Monday, the Supreme Court agreed to rule on the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act passed in 2002 created PCAOB as a new government agency to regulate firms that audit the books of publicly traded companies. The key question in the case is whether the Act violated the separation-of-powers [...]
IRS Notice 2009-38 on Section 382 For Acquisition of Instruments Issued by Recipients of TARP Funds
The Internal Revenue Service issued Notice 2009-38 (.pdf) to provide guidance when instruments are acquired by the Treasury Department under the Capital Purchase Program of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (“EESA”) and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (“TARP”). The issue arose because of the massive amount of securities being acquired by the Treasury. If those [...]
Auditing Standard No. 5 for Smaller Companies
PCAOB released Staff Views for applying the provisions of PCAOB Standard No. 5 for audits of smaller, less complex public companies (.pdf) on January 23, 2009. Standard No. 5 is focused on assessing the effectiveness of internal controls over financial reporting. This Staff View of PCAOB Standard No. 5 discusses how to scale an audit [...]
Deloitte’s Year End Reporting Issues: An Update on Current Issues and Items on the Horizon
Deloitte, as part of their Financial Reporting Series presented a webinar on year end reporting issues. The panel consisted of: Bob Uhl Beth Ann Reese Glen Donovan Stuart Moss Valuations will be a hot topic for year end reporting. The problem is the current “market impairment” existing for many securities. Auction Rate Securities settlements offer [...]
ACFE Report to the Nation Occupational Fraud and Abuse
According to research conducted by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners (ACFE), U.S. organizations lose an estimated 7 percent of annual revenues to fraud. Based on the projected U.S. Gross Domestic Product for 2008, this percentage indicates a staggering estimate of losses around $994 billion among organizations, despite increased emphasis on anti-fraud controls and recent [...]
GE To Stop Offering Quarerly Earnings Forecasts
GE had originally begun making quarterly earnings forecast to display its consistent earnings to Wall Street. According to the Wall Street Journal, some GE observers think the earnings forecast prompted executives to sell assets or make other moves to hit their estimates. From a compliance perspective, you would be worried that the pressure to hit [...]
Is There More White Collar Crime Today?
Sam E. Antar, the convicted felon and former CEO of Crazy Eddie, puts forth the theory that the bad economy is accusing white collar crimes to float to the surface: Is there really more white collar crime today? No. The Madoff scheme is an example of a scheme that fell apart whent he markets went [...]
Right to Audit
From the KPMG 2008 Anti-Bribery and Anti-Corruption Survey: While 63 percent of those respondents that require periodic compliance certifications said they incorporate a right-to-audit clause in their third-party contracts, a significant majority of these (68 percent) has never exercised the right (see Chart 4). A right-to-audit clause appears to be the kind of oversight expected by [...]
