The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Microtune and two of the Plano, Texas-based technology company's former senior officers with stock options backdating.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has issued a new standard aimed at improving how state and local governments report information about derivative instruments in their financial statements.

U.S. corporations and accountants concerned over rising audit costs due to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements may soon have more to worry about — including another spike in audit charges as a result of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s proposed new standard for engagement quality review.The stricter standard, which was initially proposed back in February and would apply to audits of public companies performed under PCAOB standards, is risk-based and designed to ease identification and speed correction of audit deficiencies prior to issuing the auditor’s report.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board issued the latest inspection report of Big Four firm Deloitte & Touche, noting problems with nine audits performed by the firm last year.With two unidentified clients, the PCAOB said that Deloitte failed to identify a departure from generally accepted accounting principles that it should have addressed before issuing its audit report. In both cases, the clients incorrectly concluded that interest rate swaps qualified for hedge accounting using the short-cut method in Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 133.

Last month, a survey released by Big Four Firm Deloitte revealed that U.S. companies require just a tad more preparation and training before International Financial Reporting Standards can be adopted. My guess — as a more-than-casual observer of the profession — is that that finding, which polled chief financial officers and other senior-level financial professionals, probably surprised no one.With convergence of U.S. GAAP with IFRS an inevitability, the profession needs to get proactive, as opposed to its traditional reactive pose, in bracing for the eventual by-product of that union — a single set of global accounting standards.

The state of e-services today can be compared to where e-filing was about five years ago.“If you look back five years, what we were saying about e-filing would sound a lot like what we’re saying about e-services today,” said Roger Harris, president of Padgett Business Services and former chair of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council. “As practitioners and the IRS worked together, a lot of problems were solved. And today e-filing is the normal way of doing business. It will be the same with e-services.”

Financial guarantee insurance companies stand behind trillions of dollars in financial obligations — including many of the mortgages that have recently fallen into default.So the Securities and Exchange Commission had good reason to call for new disclosures and clarifications of existing accounting and financial reporting standards.