Audit

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.

Raymond James Financial will pay $2.75 million to a brokerage firm regulator for poor supervision of its more than 1,100 branch managers who manage their own offices.

Not even a year after pledging to stand by the side of its Japanese affiliate, PricewaterhouseCoopers announced that the doors to its Misuzu Audit Corp. firm would close, after revelations of the unit’s ties to a second scandal surfaced.

The International Accounting Standards Board has published an exposure draft of a slimmed-down handbook outlining its international financial reporting standard for small and midsized companies.

A federal judge in New York has ruled that the Internal Revenue Service will not have to release documents that defendants in the KPMG tax shelter case claim reveal that some IRS personnel did not believe the Big Four firm was required to register the shelters.

Five Silicon Valley businessmen are suing Ernst & Young, accusing the firm of roping them into an illegitimate tax shelter around the time of the dot-com implosion.

KPMG LLP has named Phil Rohrbaugh to the newly combined position of vice chairman of industries and marketing.In the position, Rohrbaugh, 54, will be responsible for enhancing the skills and knowledge of KPMG’s professionals around key industries. Formerly managing partner for KPMG’s Philadelphia office, Rohrbaugh will also serve as a member of the U.S. firm’s management committee.

The Connecticut Society of CPAs is very, very good at disseminating specific financial planning and tax tips not only to CPAs but also to the general public. Some of those recently caught my eye as being particularly easy to understand and right to the point.The society sent out a notice on its Web site about how the public could get their money matters in order after popping champagne corks, tossing confetti, and making New Year’s resolutions.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued a standard providing companies with an option to report selected financial assets and liabilities at fair value.

The Securities and Exchange Commission will hold a roundtable discussion next month concerning a plan to eventually allow companies based outside the United States to file financial results in the country using international accounting standards.Slated for March 6 in Washington, senior SEC staff members from the Office of the Chief Accountant, the Division of Corporation Finance and the Office of International Affairs will all participate. The roundtable will be open to the public and will focus on the effect such a change would have on U.S. companies and investors, as well as on U.S. capital raising and the capital markets.

Katherine Schipper, a recent member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, has joined the advisory board for BNA’s recently launched Accounting Policy & Practice Series.