Audit

Reuben E. Price & Co. Public Accountancy Corp., a small firm based in San Francisco, has been censured by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board for failing to take action after one of the firm's clients issued an annual report that appeared to be, but was not, audited.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has approved the board's recommended ethics and independence rules for auditor independence, tax services and contingent fees.

PricewaterhouseCoopers announced plans to bring more than 300 new jobs to the Tampa Bay in the next two years as part of a new knowledge services organization.

The International Federation of Accountants has released its 2006 handbook of standards.

With an advisory panel poised to formally propose that the Securities and Exchange Commission relax the internal controls provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for some public companies, the panel's chairman is seeing audit troubles of a company on whose board he serves dragged into the spotlight.

An independent report, backed by data from Big Four clients, shows that corporate auditing costs for Sarbanes-Oxley 404 compliance dropped significantly in 2005.

Investors around the globe are demanding that businesses embrace tougher corporate governance standards, according to a survey from research and consulting firm Institutional Shareholder Services.

New York State does not have a mandatory peer review process, despite the fact that 41 other states have opted into the American Institute of CPAs' nearly 30-year-old peer review program.All this may change, however, as both the New York State Society of CPAs and the AICPA have come out with proposals that urge peer review to be made part of the CPA licensing process. The New York position, in fact, goes a step further by suggesting that the process involve disciplinary teeth, as well as educational and remedial programs.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board named Laura Phillips and Jennifer Rand to the position of deputy chief auditor. Both will report to Tom Ray, the PCAOB's chief auditor and director of professional standards.A former auditor at Big Four firm Ernst & Young, Phillips, 36, joined the PCAOB staff in July 2003 and was named associate chief auditor in February 2004. She played a substantial role in developing PCAOB Auditing Standard No. 2, which implements the internal control audit requirement established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

A study commissioned by the United Kingdom's accounting regulator and the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry said that the dominance of the Big Four is not healthy for competition and prevents small and midsized firms from gaining entry into blue-chip clients.

The chairman of an advisory panel to the Securities and Exchange Commission said that the group's pending proposal to roll back some of the internal controls provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has not been dismissed even before it is officially proposed.

A husband and wife have filed a case against Ernst & Young, blaming the firm for the loss of $40 million in a tax shelter deemed abusive by the Internal Revenue Service, according to a published report.

Financial literacy scores of high school students continue to hover just around the 50 percent mark, according to the Jump$tart Coalition for Personal Financial Literacy, a national non-profit organization.

The country's largest jewelry retailer, Zale Corp., announced that its accounting, executive pay and severance agreements are under official investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The just-released Winter 2005-2006 issue of the Statistics of Income Bulletin discloses that adjusted gross income rose in 2004 for the second year in a row, increasing by 8.9 percent to $6.8 trillion. The largest component of AGI, salaries and wages, increased 6.0 percent to $4,977.9 billion, while net capital gains rose 53.2 percent to $442.1 billion. Taxable income increased 10.6 percent to $4.6 trillion.

Eighty-four percent of senior finance executives polled by global CPA and business advisory firm Grant Thornton said that rules that allow companies in bankruptcy to turn over their pension obligations to the federal Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp. should be tightened.

A survey of 120 chief financial officers and comptrollers found that more than 80 percent of the executives are in favor of rules that would make it harder for bankrupt companies to turn over pension obligations to the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corp.

My brother just retired from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to Venice, Florida. "I used to be a doctor," he now says, and then turns to one of three books he will read in a week.

A new survey says that the average cost for the internal controls provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is $3.8 million, down 16.3 percent from last year and about halfway to the drop anticipated for the second year of compliance.

Personal bankruptcy filings dropped to their lowest level in 20 years during 2006's first quarter, according to financial research firm Lundquist Consulting Inc.