Audit

SHAW AUDITOR RESIGNSThe Shaw Group Inc., a Baton Rouge, La.-based multi-services provider for clients in the government and private sectors, said that Big Four firm Ernst & Young will resign as the company's auditor.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has scheduled an open meeting on April 3 to consider proposing an auditing standard, “Evaluating Consistency of Financial Statements.”

A federal appeals court ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission overstepped its authority in updating rules governing brokers who offer financial advice.

I was raised in a medical family, meaning I was exposed to doctors and hospitals from the get go. It was a nice, comfortable atmosphere where none of the three sons was ever concerned about money. My mother never worked and my father did quite well except for stock investments.But in all those years living at home, I wouldn’t think of asking my father how much money he had or what kind of estate he was considering leaving to us kids, or even my mother. It just wasn’t the topic of any dinnertime conversation and my mother certainly never raised it. Actually, she was smart enough to take a portion of her weekly allowance and put it aside in stocks and bonds, and did quite well. Talk about a self-made woman. Without any formal education, she was just street smart about making sure she had her own protection in the event my father’s latest foray in investments went awry. It did once when he was a principal investor in Tucker automobiles but that’s a story for another time.

Dallas-based law firm Jenkens & Gilchrist Corp. will pay $76 million to the Internal Revenue Service to settle charges over its aggressive marketing of questionably legal tax shelters to wealthy individuals.

A prominent southern Illinois automobile dealer and three promoters of a tax fraud scheme in the U.S. Virgin Islands were indicted on a variety of tax and wire fraud-related charges, the Justice Department and the Internal Revenue Service recently announced.A federal grand jury in East St. Louis, Ill., returned the 21-count indictment, which charges James A. Auffenberg Jr. of Swansea, Ill., Peter G. Fagan of De Leon, Texas, James W. Ferguson III of Amarillo, Texas, and J. David Jackson of St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands, as well as a number of alleged business fronts held by the men. They face conspiracy, income tax evasion, wire fraud and aiding in the filing of false individual and corporate income tax returns charges.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced it will hold an open meeting on April 4, to discuss the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s proposed auditing standard for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the coordination of the proposed changes with the SEC’s own guidance concerning implementation.

In a recent interview with Practical Accountant, Judith O’Dell, the recently-appointed chairwoman of the Private Company Financial Reporting Committee, explained the mandate that the committee will be following as it explores the need for different reporting standards for public and private companies in the following months.

Group Names Top Firms for Accounting, Governance Excellence

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two former in-house lawyers at Enron Corp. with securities fraud over a Brazilian scheme to move losses off the company’s balance sheet.

The Justice Department said that a California marketer has pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge of defrauding the United States for his involvement in a tax fraud scheme.Todd Eugene Strand of Murrieta, Calif., pleaded guilty today in a Kansas City federal court this week. According to the government’s indictment, between June 1997 and April 2002, Strand and a trio of co-defendants -- Daniel Joel Gleason, Michael Craig Cooper and Jesse Ayala Cota -- operated a scheme to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and taxpayers.

A number of firms, especially the larger regionals, are going corporate. This approach to firm governance is seen as having an overall advantage over the strict partnership model as partners at different stages in their careers and with different specialties and concerns often find it hard to reach consensus or take decisive action quickly.

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that could clarify whether outside vendors can be sued under securities laws for participating in transactions that were part of another company's accounting fraud.The lawsuit before the court was brought against suppliers for St. Louis, Mo.-based Charter Communications Inc., a cable company which was tied to a $17-million revenue-inflation scheme in the late-1990s. Charter paid cable box vendors extra cash for their boxes, if the companies promised to purchase advertising from the company in return. Several of the company’s top executives were later indicted on accounting fraud charges.

In a strategy designed to help modernize the business-reporting model, board members of the American Institute of CPAs’ recently restructured Center for Audit Quality will embark on a multi-city “listening tour."The aim of the tour is for members to engage investors, regulators, academics and business leaders and, subsequently, offer a series of recommendations.

The Securities and Exchange has censured Ernst & Young, ordering the Big Four firm to pay $1.6 million to settle charges of compromising its independence and contributing to faulty accounting by a client in 2001.As part of the settlement, E&Y neither admitted nor denied the agency’s allegations, made in connection with the firm’s audit work for Pittsburgh-based regional bank PNC Financial Services Group.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's Office of the Chief Accountant has selected four professional accounting fellows to serve two-year terms beginning this summer.

Representatives from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board meet with its Japanese, Korean and Chinese counterparts last week, as well as accepting an invitation to become a member of the newly-formed International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators.Chairman Mark Olson and board member Charles Niemeier participated in a meeting of the forum in Tokyo, where they discussed ways to foster cooperation between regulators responsible for the oversight of public company auditors. They also met privately with the PCAOB’s counterpart in Japan, the Certified Public Accountants and Auditing Oversight Board and the Japanese Financial Services Agency.

The Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards Inc. has released a second exposure draft of proposed changes to its, “Standards of Professional Conduct.”

It has come to my attention that the advisor-client relationship may be sinking and that you need to do something about it.My friends at SEI, a leading global provider of outsourced asset management, investment processing, and investment operations solutions, has done us all a big favor with its latest survey of some 100 clients of the SEI Advisor Network because it reveals that 28 percent of advisors attribute client relationship failures to a lack of understanding. The result is that advisors need to communicate more clearly to avoid straining or losing clients.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by a small Nevada audit firm challenging the constitutionality of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.