Audit & Accounting

An analysis of charitable foundations set up by professional basketball players found that many of them spend only a fraction of their money on charitable activities.

Hopefully there will be many lessons learned from the Bernard Madoff scandal once there is a better understanding of exactly what happened. I am sure there will be a number of in-depth books written on the subject. There will be chapters on asset allocation, due diligence, risk management, the SEC, internal operations of investment companies, compliance officers, investment advisors, fund of funds, hedge funds, auditors, peer review, whistleblowers, independent custodians, lawsuits, transparency, and regulatory change. All of the above are very interesting, but the chapter that I am most interested in is the one on human nature.

A group of 61 members of Congress has written to President Bush asking him to suspend rules that require senior citizens to withdraw money from their severely depleted retirement accounts by the end of the year.

CEOs at many companies are earning a greater proportion of their compensation in the form of stock, but they're still getting more cash than ever, according to a new study.

PricewaterhouseCoopers believes that M&A activity will be dominated in 2009 by "mergers of necessity" as distressed companies seek the protection of more stable parents.

Members of the Financial Accounting Standards Board came under pressure to relax fair value accounting rules when banking regulators would not change their capitalization requirements. FASB decided to loosen rules that kept banks from accounting for the cash flows they expected from mortgage-backed securities and other assets during impairment tests when they are categorized as available for sale, rather than just as held to maturity.

The Internal Revenue Service is proposing temporary regulations on foreign base company sales income.

The Internal Revenue Service has finalized the revised Form 990 and 990-EZ information returns that tax-exempt organizations will need to file next year.

The Internal Revenue Service has given Section 529 tuition programs the ability to change their investment strategies more frequently in response to the financial crisis.

Cheshire Software has added estate planning features to its wealth management product.