Accounting standards

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, or Freddie Mac, agreed to pay a $50 million penalty after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged it with securities fraud.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued proposed regulations governing patents on tax strategies and advice as a bill works its way through Congress outlawing such patents.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox said that data tags had been developed for the entire system of U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, advancing the use of the Extensible Business Reporting Language for automating financial reporting information.

The Internal Revenue Service has issued regulations governing practice before the agency.

SEC Chairman Christopher Cox is making a serious push to get more public companies and their accountants to start using Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, to publish their financial statements, and the day may soon be at hand when it's going to be required.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Dwight Sean Jones, a former NFL player turned investment advisor, with failing to allow commission staff to examine his business records.

New proposed Internal Revenue Service regulations to determine the value of a taxable estate may create a series of traps for unwary executors and tax preparers, according to the American Institute of CPAs.Moreover, the regulations lead to the situation where an estate must be held open for a number of years to determine the amount of the deduction for a contingent obligation.

Things change. Even assumptions. When assumptions change - assumptions about interest rates, discount rates, actuarial projections, and the like - other things change as a result.It was the war in Iraq that indirectly brought the issue to light. To the surprise of the U.S. Treasury, the extent of the U.S. military's costs for pensions, other post-employment benefits, and health care costs associated with the Veterans Administration appeared to be lower in 2006 than in 2005, despite an ongoing war.

Japanese electronics giant NEC said it was unable to file its annual report from last year and would not be able to restate prior financial results going back to 2000 because of difficulties reconciling Japanese GAAP standards with U.S. GAAP standards.

The Securities and Exchange Commission voted with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System to implement the bank broker provisions of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999.

The American Institute of CPAs has urged the Internal Revenue Service to withdraw regulations the IRS and Treasury Department proposed in April for changing the open account debt rules between S corporations and shareholders.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Enforcement Division came under fire in a report that criticized the division's oversight of its caseload.

The American Institute of CPAs and the Financial Accounting Standards Board have set a date for FASB's Private Company Financial Reporting Committee to meet.

The Center for Audit Quality named three of its first public board members, including a former SEC commissioner, Harvey Goldschmid.

Proxy researcher Glass Lewis & Co. has rolled out its ESG Watch List Service, a tool that enables Glass Lewis' proxy voting clients to track companies with environmental, social or governance policies and/or practices that may create operational, performance, financial, legal or accounting risks. The service incorporates ratings from IW Financial, a provider of research, analytics and consulting services that enable investors to incorporate ESG factors into the investment process. ESG Watch List Service notifies users when the practices or the ESG performance of a company within their portfolio approaches a level that may be of concern based on evaluation criteria established for the list by the client. Glass Lewis ViewPoint clients can set up one or more pre-set profiles, or can elect to create custom profiles for rating the 3,000 U.S. companies in the Glass Lewis-IW Financial databank.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged some 37 audit firms and 32 audit partners with reviewing the financials of public companies without undergoing mandatory registration with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.According to the regulator, the unregistered firms and partners conducted some 60 audits between November 2003 and October 2005.

The American Institute of CPAs has issued an exposure draft of a proposed audit and accounting guide for the airline industry and is looking for comments.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a rule from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority that would crack down on abusive sales of deferred variable annuities, particularly to senior citizens.

Computer Sciences Corp. said it would restate its fiscal 2007 results after examining the impact of FASB Interpretation No. 48, or FIN 48, and discovering accounting errors for fiscal 1997 through 2007.

While the Internal Revenue Service has issued a plan that adopts the IRS Oversight Board's goal of 86 percent voluntary compliance by 2009, National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson cautioned against IRS efforts to ramp up enforcement excessively and cut corners in its treatment of taxpayers if it is pressured to do too much too soon."For fiscal year 2008, both the Internal Revenue Service and the Taxpayers Advocate Service face similar challenges," she said, in the second of her two annual reports to Congress. "The IRS is under scrutiny for its efforts to close the tax gap, while the TAS is struggling to address taxpayer difficulties that arise as a result of these very efforts."