Complying with the federal tax code costs American taxpayers at least $100 billion annually, and lost economic efficiency associated with the tax system may top half a trillion dollars, auditors for the Government Accountability Office told Congress.In a report likely to add fuel to the campaign for an easy-to-administer national consumption tax, the GAO said that the lowest available estimates of the cost of complying with federal income, payroll and excise taxes is $107 billion - a whopping 1 percent of the nation's total gross domestic product. Other studies suggest that compliance costs may be 50 percent higher than these estimates.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has proposed a new standard that would clarify accounting for sales and pledges of receivables and future revenues, including those arising from tobacco settlement agreements.The proposal addresses whether certain transactions should be regarded as collateralized borrowing, or as a sale.

The workload for financial advisors in Seattle and Austin lessened somewhat over the last few years, as big employers such as Microsoft and Dell curtailed their use of stock options.Across the nation, an increasing number of companies have moved toward alternative forms of employee incentive compensation in response to the sweeping changes in accounting rules regarding options expensing dictated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board.

Since Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act went into effect, both external and internal auditors have been unsure exactly how to treat "the work of others," not to mention "each other."The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have made it clear that public auditors need to scrutinize companies more carefully, including their internal controls over financial reporting, but at a PCAOB roundtable discussion in April, auditors and corporate financial officers complained of the increased cost of these intensified audits.

Weak financial management at the Securities and Exchange Commission has led to budget overruns of nearly $50 million in two years, according to a report issued by the Government Accountability Office.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies has announced plans for a two-day meeting in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 24 and 25.

The independence of auditors was the focus of an international forum hosted by the Ethics Committee of the International Federation of Accountants in Brussels on Oct. 11