Audit & Accounting

Members of the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators agreed in principle on the text of a multilateral arrangement for exchanging information about audit firms during a meeting in Taipei.

The International Accounting Standards Board voted Tuesday to propose a one-year deferral of the revenue recognition standard that the IASB converged last year with the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board.

The American Institute of CPAs is pushing to improve the quality of employee benefit plan audits, in part by discouraging unqualified firms from offering the service, in advance of an upcoming report from the U.S. Department of Labor that is expected to find continuing problems with the quality of one-third of the audits.

The American Institute of CPAs has issued a set of questions and answers on the services a practitioner can provide in connection with the American Land Title Association’s Best Practices Framework for real estate settlement.

A Citigroup Inc. unit and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP must face claims they played a part in costing investors more than $1 billion in Bernard Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme, an appeals court ruled.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has proposed three accounting standards updates related to employee benefit plans and another update for electricity contracts.

Practical tips for when and what to disclose

Senators Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Grassley, R-Ia., have re-introduced legislation to make disciplinary proceedings of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board public in order to expose auditing deficiencies at firms or the companies they audit in a timely way and help curb violations.

The recent IFAC Global SMP Survey from the International Federation of Accountants showed that attracting new clients is a top concern for accountants in small and medium practices, with 58 percent of respondents rating it as a high or very high challenge.

Chief audit executives in the power and utility industry rank cyber security as the highest risk and biggest concern for their industry, according to a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers.