SEC Charges CPA with Violating Suspension Order

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday that it has filed an application in a New York federal court for enforcement against a CPA who violated an earlier SEC suspension order.

The SEC filed its application in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against Michael H. Taber, a resident of Salisbury Mills, N.Y., and Yulee, Fla., who has been licensed as a CPA by the State of New York since 1974.

The SEC alleged in its application that Taber violated a July 21, 2004 Commission Order permanently suspending him from appearing or practicing before the Commission as an accountant. According to the application, at the time of the 2004 order, Taber was employed as the controller of Sono-Tek Corporation, a public company that filed periodic reports with the SEC. Despite the 2004 order, he continued to work as a controller at Sono-Tek until 2005. His responsibilities at the company during that period included drafting quarterly and annual statements on Forms 10-Q and 10-K and preparing income statements, balance sheets, statements of cash flow, and footnotes to those financial statements.

After Taber left Sono-Tek in 2005, he went to work for Jefferson Wells International, a professional services firm that outsourced specialists to perform accounting and other work. While he was at Jefferson Wells, Taber allegedly provided a number of issuers with various accounting services, including preparing income statements and statements of cash flow; drafting and editing footnotes to these and other financial statements; compiling and computing schedules of support for such footnotes; and creating, compiling, and editing this data and other information that was then incorporated into Forms 10-Q, 10-K, and 8-K that were filed with the SEC. Taber’s relationship with Jefferson Wells ended in late 2010.

The SEC’s application seeks a district court order enforcing its 2004 order suspending Taber from appearing or practicing before the Commission as an accountant, and asks that the court order him to pay $584,650.41 in disgorgement, representing illicit compensation gained as a result of his engaging in work that was proscribed by the 2004 order, together with prejudgment interest in the amount of $146,849.02.

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