Audit & Accounting

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has released an implementation guide for the new GASB standards for accounting and financial reporting for pensions.

The Financial Accounting Foundation has appointed Steven E. Buller, the managing director and former CFO of the investment management firm BlackRock, as the new chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Council, a key advisory group for the Financial Accounting Standards Board, which the FAF oversees.

The American Institute of CPAs’ Auditing Standards Board is proposing changes in subject-matter specific attestation standards.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board voted Wednesday to reorganize its future agenda to focus more closely on the issues most important to FASB stakeholders, as it anticipates completion of its remaining four convergence projects for harmonizing U.S. GAAP with International Financial Reporting Standards.

Nearly 80 percent of business executives surveyed last year by Deloitte anticipate that complying with the lease accounting standards that the Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have been collaborating on will be difficult, with concerns especially high about data quality and information technology systems.

The Financial Accounting Foundation said Tuesday that it will contribute up to $3 million to the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation to help complete some of their joint accounting standards convergence projects.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a joint motion with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd. to dismiss without prejudice a subpoena enforcement action that the SEC had filed in 2011 after Deloitte’s Chinese affiliate failed to produce audit work papers for one of its clients in China, Longtop Financial Technologies, whose securities trade in the U.S.

With eight overall new Securities and Exchange Commission clients and a net gain of five, Top 20 Firm Marcum topped the charts among large and national firms in the fourth quarter — bringing in over a million dollars in audit fees.

Grant Thornton Brazil bulks up, firm relocations and more…

KPMG has agreed to pay $8.2 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges that the firm violated rules requiring auditors to remain independent from the public companies they’re auditing to ensure they maintain their objectivity and impartiality.