Audit

European Union Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier plans to introduce draft legislation in November to curb the increasing concentration of auditing work among the Big Four firms.

Representatives of the U.S. and Japanese accounting standards boards met in Connecticut this week to talk about their efforts to converge with international standards.

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James Doty, the newly appointed chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, believes auditors need to be doing a better job of detecting suspicious patterns and practices at the companies they audit, and to do a better job of communicating their concerns.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued a discussion paper to solicit input on how to improve, simplify, and converge the financial reporting requirements for hedging activities, as it foresees the possibility of increasing divergence from international standards.

The leaders of four of the largest international accounting and auditing firms told the European Commission on Wednesday that they are ready for more official intervention in the audit market to forestall another financial crisis and they support more competition in the market.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales is calling for a “big bang” approach to implementing a series of new International Financial Reporting Standards.

Irving H. Picard, the trustee for the liquidation of Bernard Madoff’s asset management firm, has filed a complaint against JPMorgan Chase, claiming the bank had suspicions about Madoff’s Ponzi scheme going back to at least 2006, but waited until 2008 to alert authorities while it earned hundreds of millions of dollars from doing business with Madoff.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said Thursday that Steven Richards, the former assistant chief accountant in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Enforcement, will be joining the board as special adviser to the PCAOB’s new chairman, James R. Doty, at the end of March.

The focus of internal audit activities is expected to change significantly in the next five years, according to a new study.

President Obama has launched a new initiative to fund small business entrepreneurs known as Startup America, which sounds like something that might better belong on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley than on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington.

A Florida Circuit Court jury ruled in favor of the estate of a philanthropist in a case involving BDO’s audits of a defunct real estate firm.

Question: Are the Big Four and national audit firms better off with regard to reputation and public trust than they were eight years ago at the height of the Enron and WorldCom debacles?

IMGCAP(1)]Because of challenging economic times and confusion in the audit review process, impairment testing has become a hot topic.

The Obama administration proposed permanently eliminating capital gains taxes on some types of small business investments held for over five years.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have published a joint set of proposals to account for the impairment of financial assets such as loans managed in an open portfolio.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have published a proposal to establish a common approach to offsetting financial assets and liabilities on the balance sheet.

Sherron Watkins, the former vice president at Enron who tried to blow the whistle on the accounting violations at the scandal-plagued Houston energy-trading giant, told an audience at a seminar Friday on the new whistleblower provisions in the Dodd-Frank Act that she and other whistleblower employees would probably take their concerns to WikiLeaks rather than the Securities and Exchange Commission now.

Several top accounting firms made Fortune Magazine's recently released 2011 100 Best Companies to Work For list.