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by leon on April 16, 2008
Accounting firm Grant Thornton has been hauled over the coals by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board for its slack audits.With one client, the so-called experts at Grant Thornton failed to...
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by leon on April 09, 2008
To what extent is the subprime meltdown the result of an accounting technique?In theory, mark to market accounting sounds neat because it potentially gives a more realistic take by assigning a value...
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by leon on March 29, 2008
KPMG's problems seem to go from bad to worse.Earlier during the week, we had reports that the US Government was pushing hard to revive its tax shelter case, promising to play fair this time. Yeah...
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by leon on March 23, 2008
Accounting tools like budgeting and sales projections can be dangerous.According to new research out of Wharton, they can lead people astray because they do nothing in themselves to dispel biases,...
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by leon on March 22, 2008
Late last year, I did a blog entry at how the US Government was not backing down on its determination to prosecute foremr KPMG partners for peddling dubious tax shelters. That was after Judge Lewis...
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by leon on March 09, 2008
Last month I asked the question: are accountants recession-proof?. It seems that the beancounters have honed their processes and sharpened them up to the point where they could ride through and even...
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by leon on March 07, 2008
Significant changes on the boards of the American accounting rule settlers. But are they for the best? And might they make things worse?As Reuters reports, the Financial Accounting Standards Board...
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by leon on February 19, 2008
I have always talked about how Sarbanes-Oxley has turned out to be a licence to print money for accountants. The last time I did that was here. The question is whether that would continue if or when...
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by leon on January 10, 2008
Despite best efforts, problems with audits still keep coming up. According to the International Federation of Accountants, improving audit quality requires a massive shake-up of practices and...
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by leon on January 04, 2008
There seems to be a profound disconnect for chief financial officers in their first 100 days on the job. According to a McKinsey survey, most CFOs say their time is not being spent in areas where...
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by leon on December 20, 2007
Debiting accounts receivable and crediting sales are the most popular methods of cooking the books. Reimbursing air travel expenses based only on itineraries supplied by travel agencies is a...
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by leon on December 13, 2007
Big week for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. Earlier in the week, it sent a warning to the Big Four accounting firms by pinging Deloitte $1 million for violating audit standards. The...
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by leon on December 07, 2007
Several weeks ago, I did a blog entry highlighting how Iraq was an accounting black hole that's vulnerable to fraud and corruption.Now we have revelations from CBS that $1 billion of military...
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by leon on December 07, 2007
The public company Accounting Oversight Board has a proposed policy statement that would allow it to rely hand over to its international counterparts inspections of non-US audit firms going over the...
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by leon on December 04, 2007
A study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the world bank assessing which countries have improved their tax systems found that the US tax system is behind the pack.The report, Paying Taxes 2008 The global...
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by leon on December 01, 2007
The fallout from Rudy Giuliani's "Shag Fund", revealed last week in Politico.com concerning those mysterious and buried costs surrounding his extramarital affair with Judith Nathan when...
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by leon on November 15, 2007
If you are a manager, chief financial officer or auditor working for a company that comes out with a restatement, start looking for another job. That's the only conclusion you can draw from a new...
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by leon on November 13, 2007
What's wrong with this picture? When bean counting giant Grant Thornton asked chief financial officers and senior comptrollers whether they thought auditors were responsible for detecting any and...
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by leon on November 02, 2007
Hat tip to Francine McKenna at Re: The Auditors for alerting to us the prospect of entrepreneurial litigation funders threatening to drive auditors out of business.Certainly the case of third party...
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by leon on October 27, 2007
One world, one set of accounting standards? Think again, it's not going to happen that quickly. There's a fair bit of resistance out there not to mention some unresolved issues.According to a...
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by leon on October 26, 2007
With a looming Sarbanes-Oxley deadline for smaller companies, can smaller entities cope when there is an expected shortage of auditors? After December 15, between 13,000 and 14,000 companies will for...
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