Audit & Accounting

Financial Accounting Standards Board chair Leslie Seidman gave an overview of the work of the board as it tries to achieve its convergence goals with the International Accounting Standards Board, and said they were taking extra time to get the standards right and trying to simplify them to make them easier for accountants to apply.

The Center for Audit Quality has published the In-Depth Guide to Public Auditing.

The Pan African Federation of Accountants held its first meeting in Dakar, Senegal, this week.

The American Institute of CPAs told a congressional subcommittee that it should urge the U.S. Small Business Administration to increase its small business size standards for small business accounting firms to $25.5 million from the current $8.5 million.

Public Company Accounting Oversight Board Chairman James Doty plans to unveil a new model for the auditor's report and said he wanted to see disciplinary proceedings for auditing firms to be made public.

The issue includes articles on the following topics and more:

IMGCAP(1)]Check out the May 2011 issue of Accounting Today.

The International Federation of Accountants’ Professional Accountants in Business Committee has issued proposed guidance on how accountants can help businesses and their own firms do better forward-looking analysis.

The American Institute of CPAs has decided to consolidate its continuing professional education operations in North Carolina, which will result in the closure of its Texas office by next March.

Our regular readers know that our shtick is criticizing generally accepted accounting principles, as well as those who create and implement them without fully anticipating their negative impact on the quality of the resulting financial statements. This time we're going after accounting for income tax effects, which has roots dating back to 1967 and APB Opinion 11. Even though the Financial Accounting Standards Board tried to reform tax accounting with SFAS 109 20 years ago, we don't see much actual improvement.