Audit & Accounting

The newly released 2006-2007 Internal Revenue Service Priority Guidance Plan, designed as the agency's own blueprint for its guidance projects during the coming year, ranges in scope from consolidated returns to tax-exempt bonds.The Guidance Plan contains 10 more projects than last year's plan, and includes projected rulings on corporations and shareholders, employee benefits, executive compensation, excise taxes, exempt organizations, estate and gift taxes, partnerships, S corporations, and international issues.

In another lifetime, I lived and worked in Rome. It was quite an adventure and last week I returned to the city after an absence of some 30 years. Unfortunately for me, Thomas Wolfe is definitely right.

Accume Partners, a provider of internal auditing, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and risk management services, has named former UHY Advisors chief executive James B. McGuire as its president and chief operating officer.

The man who oversaw Freddie Mac's earnings restatement, as well as its financial reporting improvements, has joined the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.

A recently released exposure draft from the American Institute of CPAs contains two different interpretations under the institute's independence rules.

A new accounting bulletin from the Securities and Exchange Commission addresses how prior year misstatements should be considered when quantifying a current year's misstatement.

The AFL-CIO wants to know more about the role that the major accounting firms might have played in the handling of stock options grants the government is now investigating.

It isn't the acts of a single executive, or the misses of a particular audit team, that most concern Public Company Accounting Oversight Board member Charles Niemeier when he reflects back on the corporate scandals that resulted in the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

It's not every accounting conference that the attendees have a chance to come away with a bit of horticulture knowledge.

In a move to keep the United States ensconced as the financial capital of the world, a newly formed commission will recommend changes to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other regulatory mandates it judges to encumber domestic capital markets from remaining competitive.