Audit

Audits by the Internal Revenue Service of the tax returns of millionaires nosedived in the just-ended fiscal year, according to a new report.

Big Four Firm Ernst & Young has given Bentley University a $400,000 grant to revamp the school’s accountancy and finance curriculum.

Financial restatements in 2008 dipped 49 percent from the prior year, the lowest level in the past five years, according to a report compiled by proxy researcher Glass Lewis.

Global CPA and business-advisory firm Grant Thornton is gearing to launch a new practice unit — hedge fund internal control, governance and regulatory compliance services.

Today is the first day of spring and it’s a welcome sight for those of us in the Northeast. It’s been a rather interesting winter, to say the least. Although spring cleaning moves to the front burner, one does note that many people begin to look carefully at whether they have the right financial plan. During the winter, they kind of hibernate but with the advent of spring and the April 15th tax deadline looming, people generally start to take stock, much like they do on January 1st with New Year’s resolutions. My friend, John Napolitano, who is the chief executive officer of U.S. Wealth Management located in Braintree, Mass., and who is the author of the best-selling book Success as a Personal Financial Planner (published by Alpha), knows quite well how to build a thriving career in one of today’s hottest fields. So he has set forth specific questions that one should ask when looking for a financial planner. I should also say that John is quite blunt when it comes to financial planning. “Anyone with a pulse can call themselves a financial planner, and many people have hired planners who later turned out to be salesmen who didn't give a darn about their long-term plan.”

Ernst & Young and Swiss bank UBS have been sued by a group of investors in Luxembourg who put money in a fund that directed 95 percent of their assets to Bernard Madoff’s firm.

The economic crisis will force many companies to cut costs at their internal audit departments, according to a new study from PricewaterhouseCoopers.

If you ever meet Leisha John, check out her fingernails.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board are working together on resolving the knotty problems involved in lease accounting.

No matter how much money your client has, it’s crucial to have a basic estate plan simply to ensure that the financial goals of the client are met after the client dies.

David Friehling, the accountant who ran the tiny auditing firm that serviced Bernard Madoff’s broker/dealer firm, has been arrested and charged with securities and investment advisor fraud.

CPA firm Hill, Barth & King has acquired Stikelether & Associates of Fort Pierce, Fla., expanding the firm’s presence on the state’s “Treasure Coast.”

Accounting Today has published its latest annual ranking of the Top 100 accounting firms.

The nation's small businesses are squarely in Washington's crosshairs - targeted for more rigorous, more painful scrutiny by both federal tax enforcement officials and the nation's auditing standard-setters.The first whiff of the shift in increased enforcement to smaller business came last summer, with a new study by tax researchers at Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse that discovered that the number of federal tax audits targeting small businesses with between $10 million and $50 million in assets increased by 29 percent from 2005 to 2007. Among the smallest companies - those with assets under $10 million - Internal Revenue Service investigations increased a whopping 41 percent.

One of the many problems the ongoing financial crisis has brought to light is the fact that generally accepted accounting principles do not necessarily give investors all the information they need to foresee the perils that a company faces. And though auditors have to certify that an entity is a "going concern," they do not have to note that the concern is going over a cliff.Eleanor Bloxham, chief executive officer of the Corporate Governance Alliance, a governance advisory concern, said that the problem lies in the failure of financial reports to report a crucial fact: a company's actual financial condition.

Mary Lloyd says that retirement is simply not for old folks, anymore! In fact, she is out to change the concept that retirement means sitting in rocking chairs, watching sunsets, and playing shuffleboard, with the big night out every week consisting of a bus ride to the bingo hall. To young people, that seems as attractive as a long, slow root canal without Novocain. Lloyd is the author of Super-Charged Retirement from Hankfritz Press (www.mining-silver.com), and her view is that retirement doesn’t mean retreating from life, but rather, embracing it and all the things that drive one’s passions and fuel one’s fire. “The current version of retirement doesn’t work because we are living too long to be satisfied with a life that is focused primarily on leisure,” says Lloyd. “To make this stage of life meaningful, it needs to be shaped according to the values and preferences of each individual. That’s not as easy as it sounds and we need more resources to help us find the right things to create a satisfying life once we are old enough to retire.” Her advice doesn’t come from studies or data, but by walking the walk. By the time she was 47, she was working as a division manager for a Fortune 200 company, and found retirement a financially feasible option. So, in 1993, she left her job to embark on her “last” career, which was as a fiction writer. Given the tough ladder she had climbed in the business world, she didn’t think this next phase of her life would be difficult. After trying everything from a multi-month world cruise to deploying to Texas with the Red Cross in the aftermath of Hurricane Rita – with a few adventures in between – Lloyd finds herself singing a different song in 2009. Her message is simple: the current approach of retirement doesn’t work. Her tips for her baby-boomer brethren include: *The 100 percent leisure model of retirement (“the Golden Years”) is just a marketing spin for “get out of the way.” *We need some kind of work to thrive once we retire, even if we don’t do it for pay. Retiring doesn’t mean we have to stop making a difference. *By this time in our lives, each of us has a unique set of skills, talents and abilities. We need to mesh that with a personal sense of what’s important to define our own individual sense of purpose. *Living through our sense of purpose is as essential as breathing. Once we lose that, we lose the ability to make the choices we need to thrive. *Much of what we blame on aging is really the result of mindset and lifestyle decisions. It is within our capability to change and alter those elements of our lives, and master our destiny, rather than be a slave to circumstances. “The RV model might work for some, but most of us need a goal to work toward to feel worthwhile,” Lloyd says. “To retire well, we need learn how to include that and still relax and have fun.”

The Internal Revenue Service has been spending tens of thousands of hours auditing nonprofit credit counseling agencies and ordering changes at the vast majority of them, according to newly released data.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and its parent organization, the Financial Accounting Foundation, sent a comment letter to the Securities and Exchange Commission giving a thumbs-up to the proposed roadmap to International Financial Reporting Standards, but they urged more consultation and study.

The average settlement as a result of securities class-action litigation dropped more than 50 percent in 2008, to $31.2 million, according to a report from Cornerstone Research.

Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty to 11 charges in connection with a gigantic Ponzi scheme that swindled his clients out of up to $65 billion.