“If accounting errors were felonies in California, Fannie Mae would already be serving life under Three Strikes.” That’s what GoingConcern.com said. See what I told TheStreet.com about Fannie Mae’s latest multi-billion dollar “adjustments”.
The AgFeed case is the mother lode for an SEC that says it’s ready to rack up some accounting fraud enforcement points and, perhaps, pursue a more aggressive enforcement approach to sparsely utilized Sarbanes-Oxley provisions like Section 304, clawbacks.
It’s been almost three years since I first broke the story of KPMG’s loaned tax staff arrangement with audit client GE. On January 24 the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced an $8.2 million settlement with KPMG over violations of auditor-independence rules. The wheels of justice turn very slowly. But the GE case was not one of the three cited as the subject of the enforcement action.
A blog post at Medium.com last Friday updated everyone with the latest on the JP Morgan “Whale” traders who were indicted last week and assorted other energy trading and mortgage related investigations. But there’s more!
Robert Ricketts, Texas Tech University and Rawls College of Business accounting department chairman, invited me to speak at his school last April. Here’s a link to the presentation, an excerpt and some additional comments on recent news.
Like a lot of things Buffett and Berkshire, there’s more to the Swiss Re dispute resolution story than the snappy repartee tells you.
Here’s how KPMG Chairman John Veihmeyer explained Scott London’s inside trading and the firm’s response to accounting professors, an important stop in the audit industry supply chain.
This post about Ernst & Young’s aggressive tax advice to audit client Wal-Mart was originally posted October 29, 2007. It’s worth everyone – I’m talking to you SEC and PCAOB – taking another look at this given Wal-Mart’s new Mexican bribery problems and the SEC investigation of Ernst & Young for tax lobbying to audit clients. (Ernst & Young has been silent and left out of most media discussion about Wal-Mart’s FCPA problems in Mexico and elsewhere.)
I’m in San Diego at the Accounting Program Leaders Group/Federation of Schools of Accountancy annual seminar. I spoke Sunday on the profession and its professionals.
I was in New Orleans this past long Martin Luther King Day weekend to speak at the American Accounting Association Auditing Section Midyear Conference. Here are my slides and text of my remarks.
PwC’s professional role as the auditor of the Academy’s financial statements and reviewer and signer of its tax return is a big deal to the Academy’s members, its grantees, and to the IRS. However, as my Forbes piece details, PwC doesn’t apparently charge much for its statutory audit and tax review services, let alone the rest of the consulting work they do at awards time.
Because I’m so tired, tired of waiting…
