Audit & Accounting

Six Deloitte member firms -- located in the Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands and Jamaica -- will join together to create Deloitte Caribbean/Bermuda.

Next month will mark my second anniversary of being involved in-depth with the accounting profession. And I don’t think much more than a work day has ever passed without Jeffrey Skilling popping up in some fashion or another.

A federal panel is recommending changes to governmental accounting that would require the cost of future Social Security and Medicare payments to be accounted for year-by-year as workers accumulate entitlements.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has settled civil fraud charges against the former chief financial officer of Comverse Technology Inc., part of a case that is one of the agency’s first involving options backdating.

I always believed that New York had a deserved reputation of aggressively going after individuals regarding whether they have New York residency with regard to collection of its income and estate taxes.

At the end of the massive Enron accounting scandal, the burden of serving hard time has fallen to former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, who was sentenced to 24 years and four months in jail as he continued to maintain his innocence five years after the energy giant's historical collapse.Skilling, 52, also faces fines of $18 million, a lesser amount than the $100 million in reparations and fines sought by federal prosecutors. Lake also approved a payment of $45 million from Skilling to former employees who lost money in Enron's pension funds was also approved.

The partners of a pair of Charleston, S.C., accounting firms announced that on the heels of a merger, their business will be acquired by regional accounting firm Dixon Hughes PLLC.Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The Rehmann Group announced plans to merge with Farmington Hills, Mich.-based Boyes, Wright, Pittman & Co. PLLC and Traverse City, Mich.-based Weber, Curtin & Pahssen LLC, in a deal effective Jan. 1, 2007.Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

An International Federation of Accountants board has issued an exposure draft of a proposed standard, “Impairment of Cash-Generating Assets.”

Former U.S. Treasury secretary and Harvard University president Lawrence H. Summers will join New York hedge fund firm D.E. Shaw & Co. as a part-time managing director."Larry is an enormously gifted economist and has made major contributions as a researcher, a public servant and an academic leader," David Shaw, chairman of the $25-billion fund manager, said in a statement.