Audit

Officials from the U.S. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have met with Chinese officials to try to resolve the impasse over inspections of accounting firms in China that audit Chinese companies whose stocks trade on U.S. exchanges.

The U.S. CPA Exam was successfully administered at five international test sites: Japan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.

The New York State Society of CPAs sees comparability and quality as two of the main obstacles to the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in the U.S.

KPMG has agreed to pay $37 million as part of a $627 million settlement in a class-action lawsuit brought by institutional investors over its former audit client Wachovia.

ARC Logics, a Wolters Kluwer business, has released version 10 of its CCH TeamMate internal auditing software, designed to help internal auditors manage each step of the audit process more efficiently.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board intends to host a pair of public roundtable meetings in the fall to discuss issues related to private company accounting and reporting standards.

The International Accounting Standards Board has proposed delaying by two years the mandatory effective date for its IFRS 9 standards for financial instruments, postponing them from Jan. 1, 2013 to Jan. 1, 2015.

IMGCAP(1)]Remember the fall of Enron? What about Tyco International, Adelphia and WorldCom?

A new report from Ernst & Young finds that many companies can improve their Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

About a year and a half ago, our editorial team was involved in the annual ritual of envisioning new products that our sales team could potentially take to market and, hopefully, attract several interested sponsors.

A federal judge has thrown out most of the key claims in a class-action lawsuit against Ernst & Young over its audits of Lehman Brothers.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has disciplined a pair of Ernst & Young auditors after they allegedly provided misleading documents and information to PCAOB inspectors and altered and backdated working papers.

Washington, D.C. - The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has issued a concept release that aims to overhaul the auditor's reporting model, describing different alternatives to provide more information to investors from the auditors of publicly traded companies.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has written to Groupon asking the company behind the popular group discount site to clarify the accounting measures it used in its filing for an initial public offering.

PwC has released the second edition of “A Guide to Forensic Accounting Investigation,” providing a step-by-step approach to fraud prevention, investigation and deterrence.

IMGCAP(1)]With Medicare fraud costing the federal government an estimated $60 billion a year, it makes perfect sense that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has tapped aerospace innovator Northrop Grumman to create a predictive model that will detect fraud. Or does it?

The National Association of State Boards of Accountancy and the American Institute of CPAs have launched a new Web site, CPAmobility.org, that provides up-to-date information on the status of CPA mobility laws across the country.

IMGCAP(1)]The use of third-party practice aids and audit programs has become widespread as an economical and effective means of keeping audit materials up to date and comprehensive. However, some auditors have become too checklist oriented, driven in part by these standardized audit materials. Use of these types of materials creates risks that auditors may get lost in the completion of the checklist and lose sight of what they should be doing, which is assessing and responding to audit risk.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has beefed up its standards for multiple-employer pension plans, requiring employers to provide more information about their pension plan obligations, particularly for unionized employees.

Michael Andrew, chairman-elect of KPMG International, announced the firm's new leadership team today, including a new deputy chairman and new global heads of tax and advisory, as well as a new regional leader in Asia-Pacific.