Audit & Accounting

A vast majority of American investors are lacking the "investor survival skills" needed to build their savings into a retirement nest egg, according to the Securities Investor Protection Corporation /Investor Protection Trust survey conducted by Opinion Research Corp.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously voted to propose rules to make it easier for foreign companies to stop listing their securities for trading in the country in order to avoid the expense of complying with U.S. securities laws.

Taser International Inc. said that the Securities and Exchange Commission has ended an investigation into the stun gun maker's accounting and recommended that no action be taken against the company.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox delivered an easier-said-than-done speech earlier this month on the need to simplify accounting rules.

The market for mergers and acquisitions is expected to remain strong into 2006, according to a new study released by the corporate financial advising arm of KPMG International.

Nearly half of all organizations worldwide have been victims of fraud in the past two years, according to the 2005 PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Economic Crime Survey released in late November.

An advisory panel to the Securities and Exchange Commission may officially asked the agency to exempt businesses with less than $125 million in revenues from the internal control provisions laid out in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

ISO 22222, the Standard on Personal Financial Planning, has been approved as an international standard. All ISO members (Standardization Institutes in approximately 150 countries) around the world can now adopt ISO 22222 as a national standard.

A former KPMG partner involved in the audit of Xerox Corp. has accepted a one-year ban on auditing public companies.

Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP announced that litigator Robert Axelrod has joined as a director in the company's anti-money laundering group, part of Deloitte's national forensic & dispute services practice.