Audit & Accounting

Sixty-eight percent of CFOs have taken steps to boost employee morale in the midst of the economic crisis, according to a new survey, but 26 percent haven’t done anything.

Interactive data-tagging technology could assist government auditors in monitoring the spending done under the $700-billion-plus financial bailout plan.

The Internal Revenue Service has been spending tens of thousands of hours auditing nonprofit credit counseling agencies and ordering changes at the vast majority of them, according to newly released data.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and its parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation, sent a comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission giving a thumbs-up to the proposed roadmap to International Financial Reporting Standards, but they urged more consultation and study.

The average settlement as a result of securities class-action litigation dropped more than 50 percent in 2008, to $31.2 million, according to a report from Cornerstone Research.

Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges in connection with a gigantic Ponzi scheme that swindled his clients out of up to $65 billion.

A trio of related companies have filed suit to stop the Securities and Exchange Commission from infringing the trademark of their auditing software product. Former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said last August that the SEC would develop a new interactive financial statement filing system to replace its old Edgar system. The new system, known as Interactive Data Electronic Applications, or IDEA, would rely on Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, data tag technology, which the SEC is beginning to require large public companies to use for their filings.

American Institute of CPAs’ president and chief executive Barry Melancon reiterated his organization’s stance that fair value accounting was not a primary cause of the current economic distress and that the private sector — rather than Congress — should continue to set accounting standards.

Financial Accounting Standards Board Chairman Robert Herz was pressed to make changes in mark-to-market accounting standards in as soon as three weeks during a contentious congressional hearing.

The adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in the U.S. looks to be increasingly in doubt.