Audit

Many large and midsized companies, which are required by the Internal Revenue Service to file their 2005 taxes electronically next year, have not begun preparing for the change, according to a recent poll conducted by Big Four firm KPMG.

Concluding six months of pro-bono assistance to the United Nations Development Program on the oversight of tsunami relief and reconstruction work, Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP presented its final report on the project last week.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu announced aggregate revenues for its member firms totaled $18.2 billion for the 2005 fiscal year, a 10.9 percent increase from last year.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox recently met with representatives of the accounting and financial reporting software industry to express support for integrating interactive data capabilities into existing accounting and financial reporting software.

KPMG International published its 2005 Annual Review, which includes final combined revenue and growth figures achieved by KPMG member firms.

Like its U.S. counterparts, the Canadian Public Accountability Board says that the Big Four firms have more work to do in order to improve audit quality and consistently meet professional standards. It was the board's third public report on its continuing inspections of accounting firms.

The accounting support fees imposed on corporations by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will be slashed by nearly 20 percent next year, under the organization's recently released 2006 operating budget.In announcing the new budget plan for the coming year, PCAOB officials said that the board will charge publicly traded companies a total of $109.3 million in accounting support fees during 2006 - down from the $136.1 million assessed in 2005.

FIRST VIRTUAL DISMISSES PWC: Video software concern First Virtual Communications Inc. dismissed auditor PricewaterhouseCoopers and subsequently engaged Squar Milner Reehl & Williamson as its new independent accountant.In January, First Virtual filed for Chapter 11 protection. In August, the company filed a liquidation plan that proposed a reverse merger, whereby First Virtual Communications would acquire the assets of newly formed U.S. Dry Cleaning and change its name to U.S. Dry Cleaning Corp.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced it has selected deputy chief auditor and former KPMG partner Thomas Ray as its chief auditor.

A vast majority of American investors are lacking the "investor survival skills" needed to build their savings into a retirement nest egg, according to the Securities Investor Protection Corporation /Investor Protection Trust survey conducted by Opinion Research Corp.

The Securities and Exchange Commission unanimously voted to propose rules to make it easier for foreign companies to stop listing their securities for trading in the country in order to avoid the expense of complying with U.S. securities laws.

Taser International Inc. said that the Securities and Exchange Commission has ended an investigation into the stun gun maker's accounting and recommended that no action be taken against the company.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox delivered an easier-said-than-done speech earlier this month on the need to simplify accounting rules.

The market for mergers and acquisitions is expected to remain strong into 2006, according to a new study released by the corporate financial advising arm of KPMG International.

Nearly half of all organizations worldwide have been victims of fraud in the past two years, according to the 2005 PricewaterhouseCoopers' Global Economic Crime Survey released in late November.

An advisory panel to the Securities and Exchange Commission may officially asked the agency to exempt businesses with less than $125 million in revenues from the internal control provisions laid out in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

ISO 22222, the Standard on Personal Financial Planning, has been approved as an international standard. All ISO members (Standardization Institutes in approximately 150 countries) around the world can now adopt ISO 22222 as a national standard.

A former KPMG partner involved in the audit of Xerox Corp. has accepted a one-year ban on auditing public companies.

Deloitte Financial Advisory Services LLP announced that litigator Robert Axelrod has joined as a director in the company's anti-money laundering group, part of Deloitte's national forensic & dispute services practice.

Speaking to an American Institute of CPAs conference, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox suggested that accounting rules need to be simplified in order to ensure that financial irregularities aren't hidden.