Audit

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.

The Texas Society of CPAs executive board has adopted a resolution in support of the implementation of a new GAAP model for private companies.

The Small Business Tax Credit Calculator, developed by Tax Credits LLC, is able to complete lines 1 to 14 of Form 8941 for tax preparers in all 50 states.

The Blue-Ribbon Panel on Standard Setting for Private Companies submitted a report Wednesday recommending that the Financial Accounting Foundation set up a separate board to determine private company accounting standards.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has taken a step back on previous plans to require companies to report all of their financial instruments at fair value.

The European Commission said it would recognize the equivalence of the audit oversight systems of the United States and nine other countries, laying the foundation for greater international cooperation on the supervision of auditors and auditing firms.

The Financial Accounting Foundation has released the 2011 U.S. GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy, pending final acceptance by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board has released a set of proposals to address the growing need for robust international standards for services that can be used by entities that are either not required or do not elect to be audited.

The Institute of Internal Auditors has published new professional guidance on how to assess the adequacy of risk management and measure the effectiveness and efficiency of a company’s internal audit function.