Audit & Accounting

After a two-year battle, the Internal Revenue Service has released thousands of pages of agency statistics to the Syracuse University-based Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., has proposed a $150 billion Emergency Stabilization Fund to help small businesses, universities, students and municipalities cope with the credit crisis, with the money coming from the $700 billion financial bailout package.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it has started work on a study of mark-to-market accounting authorized by the financial rescue bill that was approved last week.

Participants in a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable discussed how the credit crisis would affect the SEC's plans for an improved financial disclosure system.

The Internal Revenue Service issued a notice late last week that allows U.S. corporations to get more tax-free loans from their foreign subsidiaries.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has agreed to pay $97.5 million as a partial settlement of a securities class-action lawsuit over the firm's audits of AIG, the insurance giant recently taken over by the federal government.

The financial rescue plan approved by Congress last week included many extensions of expiring tax credits and deductions that helped it win passage in the House, but it also left out some tax issues that will surely be bones of contention for the next Congress.

American workers have lost as much as $2 trillion in their pensions and retirement savings in the past 15 months, witnesses told a hearing of the House Education and Labor Committee.

The Treasury Department's Advisory Committee on the Auditing Profession has released its final report outlining recommendations on how to improve the sustainability of the audit profession, including a dissenting statement from one of its members.

The Internal Revenue Service issued a notice aimed at calming fears that it would act against insurance-dedicated money market funds that take advantage of a new temporary guarantee program.