Audit & Accounting

A study commissioned by the United Kingdom's accounting regulator and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry said that the dominance of the Big Four is not healthy for competition and prevents small and midsized firms from gaining entry into blue-chip clients.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox announced that Wall Street fund lawyer Andrew "Buddy" Donohue will join the agency as the next director of the Division of Investment Management.

The chairman of an advisory panel to the Securities and Exchange Commission said that the group's pending proposal to roll back some of the internal controls provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has not been dismissed even before it is officially proposed.

A husband and wife have filed a case against Ernst & Young, blaming the firm for the loss of $40 million in a tax shelter deemed abusive by the Internal Revenue Service, according to a published report.

Financial literacy scores of high school students continue to hover just around the 50 percent mark, according to the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, a national non-profit organization.

The country's largest jewelry retailer, Zale Corp., announced that its accounting, executive pay and severance agreements are under official investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The just-released Winter 2005-2006 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin discloses that adjusted gross income rose in 2004 for the second year in a row, increasing by 8.9 percent to $6.8 trillion. The largest component of AGI, salaries and wages, increased 6.0 percent to $4,977.9 billion, while net capital gains rose 53.2 percent to $442.1 billion. Taxable income increased 10.6 percent to $4.6 trillion.

Eighty-four percent of senior finance executives polled by global CPA and business advisory firm Grant Thornton said that rules that allow companies in bankruptcy to turn over their pension obligations to the federal Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp. should be tightened.

For the third time, a federal court has sent rules governing the mutual fund industry back to the Securities and Exchange Commission for further reflection on the costs of the changes.

A survey of 120 chief financial officers and comptrollers found that more than 80 percent of the executives are in favor of rules that would make it harder for bankrupt companies to turn over pension obligations to the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.