Audit

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce said that the Securities and Exchange Commission is overstepping its bounds in seeking to punish corporate wrongdoing.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced a series of roundtables that will be held throughout the year, with a focus on speeding the implementation of new Internet tools to help provide investors and analysts with better financial information about companies and funds.

With plenty of biting words, a federal judge released former KPMG accounting executive David Greenberg on $25 million bail, ordering him to live in Manhattan under electronic monitoring until his trial for tax fraud begins.

The American Enterprise Institute will host a morning conference, titled " Sarbanes-Oxley: What Have We Learned?" on March 13.

Kroger Co., the largest supermarket company in the country, will restate its earnings for the past three years for errors in accounting of deferred taxes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission Advisory Committee on Smaller Public Companies has published an exposure draft of its final report, outlining changes to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for micro-cap and small-cap public companies.

The doubling of restatements by U.S. companies last year could signal that the changes made under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act are having their intended impact.

The Auditing Standards Board of the American Institute of CPAs has approved eight new statements on auditing standards, collectively referred to as the risk assessment standards.

Ernst & Young has launched Ernst & Young University-Tax, a virtual resource for higher tax learning and development.

The head of the Securities and Exchange Commission said that he was not consulted before his agency's enforcement division subpoenaed two writers for Dow Jones & Co.

Ernst & Young warned some Bay Area clients that it had lost some sensitive data, including Social Security numbers, which could be possibly be used by identity thieves.

In mid-January, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board issued reports on its 2004 inspections of Grant Thornton LLP and Crowe Chizek & Co. LLC - outlining "audit deficiencies" similar to other recently released reviews from the board.In its Grant Thornton inspection report, released on January 19, the board highlighted problems that it found in audits for 15 of the firm's public company clients between May and October 2004. The problems included failure to disclose related-party transactions and testing of information technology controls, as well as accounting problems for:

BROOKLYN FEDERAL JETTISONS KPMG: Brooklyn Federal Bancorp, the parent to Brooklyn Federal Savings Bank, dismissed its auditor, Big Four firm KPMG, and retained Beard Miller Co. as its replacement.According to a federal filing, KPMG's audit reports on Brooklyn Federal's financials didn't contain any adverse opinion or disclaimer of opinion. There were no disagreements between KPMG and the company over accounting matters.

When the Auditing Standards Board met in mid-January, it resolved to propose a new standard on auditor communication. The board also started a discussion on whether quality control should be linked to compensation control.While the proposal on communication was the biggest product of the meeting, the concept of a cause-and-effect connection between auditor compensation and audit quality may ultimately have greater reverberations in the profession.

KPMG is looking for participants for the second annual Section 404 Benchmark Survey run under the firm's 404 Institute.

Speaking at a Council on Foreign Relations forum in New York a day after the advisory panel's decision, f our former chairmen of the SEC all argued against exempting any companies from the internal controls provisions, according to reports.

After more than two years of legal maneuvering, the Securities and Exchange Commission settled the last of its charges in its investigation of Xerox Corp.'s alleged earnings manipulation.

Executives contemplating cross-border transactions in emerging markets view local legal, tax and accounting systems as the biggest challenges to completing a transaction, according to a poll conducted by Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP.

A handful of boldface names from the financial world lent their signatures to a letter to federal regulators, asking that no public company be exempted from the internal controls provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

More than three years after it's original passage, but still in the infancy of its implementation, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act is facing attacks on a number of fronts.