Audit & Accounting

Americans today are being forced to review their retirement planning goals with greater scrutiny. No one knows that more than Robert Fishbein, vice president and corporate counsel with Prudential Financial, Inc. He has now offered tips on how to get through this economic turmoil.

The Internal Revenue Service commemorated Small Business Week this week by calling attention to some recently enacted tax breaks for small businesses.

Three out of four audit committee members say they have increased their hands-on involvement with management, and are reassessing risk management and oversight as a result of the economic crisis, according to a new survey.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners wants top executives at public companies to open up their finances to scrutiny by auditors and regulators.

Employment search provider Monster Worldwide agreed to pay the SEC $2.5 million in penalties to settle stock option backdating charges.

Among the tragedies inflicted on thousands of victims by Bernard Madoff was that perpetrated on a tiny accounting firm in New City, N.Y., a hamlet some 30 miles north of New York City.

Over the last several years, a substantial number of highly complex professional auditing and accounting standards have been issued by numerous standard-setters.

Ten years ago, the Dow Jones Sustainability Index began to track the financial performance of leading sustainability-driven companies around the world.

Customers are best served and protected when they have many competitive alternatives. We are suspicious of self-serving monopolies. Of course, as sellers, we all want to be monopolies, with little competition, and the ability to charge high prices, bar entry to potential competitors, be able to rest on our past successes, and not have to perform the difficult job of constant innovation and experimentation where value is determined by the external customer, not internal industry standards, credentials or ineffective government regulations.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has made changes in two of its standards related to off-balance-sheet items to require companies to make more disclosures of special-purpose entities, and to practically eliminate the exemption for qualifying special-purpose entities.