Audit & Accounting

A roundup of accounting firm mergers and acquisitions

ACL has introduced an add-in tool for Microsoft Excel aimed at auditors and compliance professionals.

The majority of attendees at a roundtable discussion Thursday in Washington, D.C., on enhancing the ethics standards for accountants favored changes by the International Ethics Standards Board of Accountants to permit reporting of illegal acts.

The American Institute of CPAs is offering a new, free newsletter called Inclusion Solutions.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun sending letters to public companies that fail to file their financials with all the necessary data using Extensible Business Reporting Language technology.

The real estate investment trust Ventas has dismissed Ernst & Young as its auditor after E&Y determined that it lacked independence because of an “inappropriate personal relationship” between an E&Y partner and Ventas’s former chief accounting officer and controller.

A subcommittee of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business held a hearing today to discuss the value of using the cash basis of accounting in small businesses, and whether they should be required to use the accrual basis.

The Institute of Management Accountants and the American Accounting Association’s Management Accounting Section have released a new framework intended to broaden the scope of accounting education.

The Institute of Internal Auditors has elected PricewaterhouseCoopers partner Anton van Wyk, a native of South Africa, as chairman of the IIA’s 2014-2015 Global Board of Directors.

Wholesale adoption in the U.S. of International Financial Reporting Standards seems unlikely to occur in the near future as the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board continue to move away from full convergence of their standards, according to a Fitch Ratings report.