Audit & Accounting

In a strategy designed to help modernize the business-reporting model, board members of the American Institute of CPAs’ recently restructured Center for Audit Quality will embark on a multi-city “listening tour."The aim of the tour is for members to engage investors, regulators, academics and business leaders and, subsequently, offer a series of recommendations.

The Securities and Exchange has censured Ernst & Young, ordering the Big Four firm to pay $1.6 million to settle charges of compromising its independence and contributing to faulty accounting by a client in 2001.As part of the settlement, E&Y neither admitted nor denied the agency’s allegations, made in connection with the firm’s audit work for Pittsburgh-based regional bank PNC Financial Services Group.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of the Chief Accountant has selected four professional accounting fellows to serve two-year terms beginning this summer.

I seldom veer off the subject of accounting in this space unless circumstances or events encourage me to do otherwise.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. has released a second exposure draft of proposed changes to its, “Standards of Professional Conduct.”

Representatives from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board meet with its Japanese, Korean and Chinese counterparts last week, as well as accepting an invitation to become a member of the newly-formed International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators.Chairman Mark Olson and board member Charles Niemeier participated in a meeting of the forum in Tokyo, where they discussed ways to foster cooperation between regulators responsible for the oversight of public company auditors. They also met privately with the PCAOB’s counterpart in Japan, the Certified Public Accountants and Auditing Oversight Board and the Japanese Financial Services Agency.

The Securities and Exchange Commission censured the American Stock Exchange last week, along with the exchange’s former chairman and chief executive, for failing to enforce securities laws and maintain proper records.

It has come to my attention that the advisor-client relationship may be sinking and that you need to do something about it.My friends at SEI, a leading global provider of outsourced asset management, investment processing, and investment operations solutions, has done us all a big favor with its latest survey of some 100 clients of the SEI Advisor Network because it reveals that 28 percent of advisors attribute client relationship failures to a lack of understanding. The result is that advisors need to communicate more clearly to avoid straining or losing clients.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a small Nevada audit firm challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

The main council that provides guidance to the Financial Accounting Standards Board doesn’t agree that the accounting profession’s rulemaking structure is in need of reshaping.