Audit & Accounting

Accountants should take the lead in assessing the impact on their companies of the depletion of natural resources, recommends a new report.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has issued a proposed standard to address the accounting and financial reporting issues related to fair value measurements for state and local governments.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released staff guidance on how the PCAOB should perform an economic analysis as part of its standard-setting process.

Paul Beswick, who has served as chief accountant in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Chief Accountant, plans to leave the agency to return to the private sector.

The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board has released for public comment proposed changes to the International Standards on Auditing to clarify the expectations of auditors when auditing financial statement disclosures.

The Center for Audit Quality and the Institute for Corporate Responsibility at the George Washington University School of Business are teaming on a new initiative on rethinking financial disclosures in response to recent comments from Securities and Exchange Commission chair Mary Jo White to streamline the existing Form 10-K disclosure requirements.

A majority of accounting and finance executives in the U.S. and Canada are anticipating that their companies’ compliance burden will increase in the years ahead, though less than half expect the cost of compliance to grow.

The quantity of financial restatements from public companies has leveled off in the past four years and the severity of those restatements has remained low, according to a new report from the research firm Audit Analytics, but restatements have increased from accelerated filers for the third straight year.

The Center for Audit Quality and the American Institute of CPAs have issued a member alert discussing regulatory changes for audits and attestation engagements of brokers and dealers and futures commission merchants, including entities that are dually registered.

Paid-for stock research has generally elicited widespread skepticism, but a new scholarly paper by three accounting professors suggests that paid-for analysts are more like auditors and credit-rating firms than is generally believed.