Audit

Grant Thornton LLP, the U.S. member firm of Grant Thornton International, reported that its revenues for the 2006 calendar year were up 18.2, to $940 million.

Several years ago, my once-reliable station car suddenly became harder to start than a fire with damp kindling.

For the past year, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating how Google accounted for its income taxes, according to the online search giant’s 2006 annual report.

A board within the International Federation of Accountants is seeking comment on its exposure draft that addresses what auditors should consider when dealing with related parties and related-party transactions.

You hear over and over again that your money has to outlive you, even for an hour. When I talk to friends and family about various financial planning aspects, the most feared one is exactly that...outliving money.There is this woman, age 91, that I know. She is a widow, in relatively good health, has a house that is fully paid (no mortgage), has a Social Security check that comes in each month for some $1,800 and a small pension amount from a prior job of about $110 a month. She buys very little food because she goes to a senior center almost every day and they load her up on free food.

The Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Board has approved the nomination of James H. Quigley -- currently the head of Deloitte’s U.S. arm -- as the next global chief executive officer of the Big Four firm, though worldwide member firm partners must still vote on the appointment.Quigley, who has served as Deloitte's U.S. chief for the past four years, will succeed William G. Parrett, another former U.S. chief whose eight-year term ends on May 31.

Sage Software has unveiled the latest version of Sage Fundraising 100, its donor relationship management system for midsized and large nonprofit organizations.

The Government Accountability Office recently released a report on detailing some of the conclusions gleaned from a recent forum on engaging and retaining older workers.

In a return to the office’s roots, the Securities and Exchange Commission has named a director for its Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs. Meanwhile, the Internal Revenue Service has appointed a new head of its Office of Professional Responsibility, which was created in the wake of the Enron implosion.

Despite escalating responsibilities, audit committees are spending less time on the priority issue of risk oversight, and also failing to develop diversity of talent and expertise within their own ranks.That’s the conclusions of Ernst & Young’s “2006 Audit Committee Survey,” which found that during the past year, audit committees have spent 20 percent or less of their time on risk oversight, and that 91 percent of audit committee members are over the age of 50, while only 8 percent of committees have more than one female member.

A flurry of e-mails and letters arrived just under the deadline for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s 70-day comment period regarding proposed changes to the audit standard on internal controls over financial reporting.

A new industry group is looking to make inroads in building support for its policy positions in Washington.The Center for Audit Quality will focus on topics such as auditor protection from lawsuits, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and how companies report financial information.

Like many other businesses, we annually welcome a new crop of recent college and graduate school graduates into our organization.Every relationship with a new employee begins with optimism. We tell them we hope they will build a career at the Deloitte U.S. firms. They tell us they want to do just that. But amid this jolly collegiality, one truth usually remains unspoken - we all know that somewhere along the line some of these new employees will dust off their résumés and look for work elsewhere. We have decided that being honest about that fact is essential to keeping American businesses like ours strong and competitive as the demographics of employment shift.

Back in the late 1990s, this column criticized those who supported pooling-of-interests accounting for business combinations. We called it "pfooling" because it was designed to trick the capital markets into believing false financial statements.Eventually, the Financial Accounting Standards Board did eliminate pooling, although it was unwilling or unable to do anything about the misleading information produced by past poolings through retroactive application. Those bad numbers will hang around for decades, making the affected statements much less useful.

LogicalApps, a provider of embedded governance software, announced that it has acquired the Integra product line from Applimation, a provider of management consulting and software for businesses using Oracle and PeopleSoft applications.

The Deloitte Foundation, a not-for-profit arm of Deloitte & Touche, announced the 2007 recipients of fellowship grants through the organization’s doctoral fellowship program.

Fitch Ratings has released its annual outlook of issues it expects to continue having an impact on the accounting profession in the coming year.

There’s an old joke that no doubt circulates through the Trial Lawyers Association, and it goes something like this:

Vitale Caturano & Co. is facing a malpractice lawsuit for allegedly failing to properly investigate a number of red flags that could have tipped a prominent New England family off to the looting of some $57 million from its trust funds.The Ayer Family Trusts holds several hundred million dollars for about 100 descendents of industrialist Frederick Ayer. Those trusts are managed under the Tenens Corp. (which does business as Essex Street Associates), and had been largely overseen by the corporation’s former chief operating office, and an employee of more than 30 years, John Doorly.

For most of my life, I have been a fairly liberal, loose-swinging person. I generally went against the mainstream and was comfortable seeking my own level and being relatively nonconformist. It served me quite well career wise.