Audit & Accounting

I read a little blurb a few weeks back about publishing house John Wiley & Sons' plans to print a "Sarbanes-Oxley for Dummies," the latest edition to its best-selling series.

The chief accountant of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Donald T. Nicolaisen, will leave the commission in October to return to the private sector.

As if investors and public companies didn't have enough to worry about, a recent "trend alert" from Glass Lewis & Co., an investment research and proxy advisory firm in San Francisco, reported that control deficiencies reported by large companies are at an all-time high, with an increase of 87 percent between 2003 and late 2004 and early 2005.

U.S. TO REISSUE 30-YEAR BOND IN Q1 2006: The Bush administration said that it would resurrect the 30-year Treasury bond, a move that it said would help to finance the national debt and, at that same time, appeal to conservative investors looking for long-term options.

When CPAs add financial services to their practices, the overwhelming method of entry is to affiliate with a broker/dealer and receive commissions. For many, there is a next stage: transitioning to a model of full financial advisory with compensation from fees based on assets under management. Careful management of the rebranding can ease clients into the new way of doing business.

D&T RESIGNS BRITESMILE: Big Four firm Deloitte & Touche has resigned as auditor for teeth-whitening products manufacturer and marketer BriteSmile Inc.

Plans by Internal Revenue Service officials and federal lawmakers to establish new national certification and testing requirements for unlicensed tax return preparers are drawing cautious support from mainstream tax professionals.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board's new statements on "other post-employment benefits" won't go into effect until the end of the year, but the questions are already coming in. Some queries are simply asking for a definition of "benefit," while others ask, "Do we really have to do this?"

The Energy Tax Incentives Act of 2005, passed as part of the 2005 Energy Act and signed by President Bush on Aug. 8, 2005, includes a series of new credits aimed at encouraging the purchase of various types of new alternative fuel vehicles.

Accounting for financial instruments with characteristics of liabilities and equities has never been easy, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board has had a hard time hammering out the difference.