Audit & Accounting

Accounting firm Citrin Cooperman has appointed longtime partner F. Wayne Holton CEO.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unveiled its next-generation system for online financial filings, IDEA, the successor to its EDGAR database.

A group representing financial executives has written to the Financial Accounting Standards Board asking to exempt private companies from the requirements of FASB Interpretation No. 48, "Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes."

I write the "M&A" update box in Practical Accountant's Profession Watch section, and one of the details we give for firms recently merged or acquired is "Niches/Concentrations."

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has issued its latest inspection report on KPMG, listing deficiencies in several sample audits conducted by the firm.

More than 65 percent of the CFOs and 70 percent of the audit committee members surveyed by accounting firm Crowe Chizek cited managing enterprise risk as the biggest challenge facing their organizations over the next 12 months.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said it would distribute millions of dollars to investors harmed by market-timing trading violations in mutual funds managed by Putnam Investment Management and Janus Capital Management.

Real estate mortgage schemes, foreclosure activities, equity stripping and fraud are booming. Individuals mastermind multi-tiered structures designed to hide participants or obfuscate relationships. They often have intentionally incomplete or poor financial records. These cases ordinarily involve desperate or opportunistic actions by very bright individuals, all connected by ambiguous documentation and well-hidden trails. As a result, the research, discovery, assessments, valuations and case preparation can become extremely complex.With the advancement of technology, new avenues for fraud, criminal behavior and outright negligence are surfacing. Now e-mail, cell phones and electronic monitoring systems provide volumes of information that can be used to discover the “smoking gun” in fraud cases. Using this electronic data and other hard-copy archives, the forensic investigation team, working closely with case attorneys and clients, sift through enormous volumes of documents to identify the possibility of fraud, financial reporting negligence, “cooked books” or other potential corruption.

PARKWAY PROPERTIES DISMISSES E&YParkway Properties Inc., a Jackson, Miss.-based real estate investment trust, dismissed auditor Ernst & Young LLP and engaged KPMG as its new independent accountant.

Will health issues force your clients to retire earlier or spend their nest eggs quicker than they planned?Four in 10 Americans retire sooner than they expected. Of those, 40 percent do so because of health issues or disability, according to the Employee Benefits Research Institute.