Audit

Giovanni Prezioso, general counsel at the Securities and Exchange Commission, said he would leave the regulator to return to a post in the private sector.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu and Grant Thornton International, along with Bank of America, have been named as defendants in two lawsuits seeking almost $1 billion for a trio of Cayman Islands companies.

Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and its global network reported combined member firm revenues of $20.3 billion for the year ended June 30, 2005, a nearly 17 percent rise in U.S. dollars versus the previous year.In local currencies, the firm's growth was about 12 percent. Excluding expenses reimbursed by clients, net aggregate revenues for the global network were $19 billion in U.S. dollars.

* FIELDSTONE JETTISONS KPMG: Fieldstone Investment Corp. has dismissed KPMG as its auditor and named Big Four rival Deloitte as its replacement.Fieldstone, a Columbia, Md.-based residential mortgage banking concern, reported no unresolved accounting disagreement with KPMG for its two most recent fiscal years.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board approved its budget for 2006, which will also allow for a reduction in the support fees paid by publicly traded companies.

As the American Institute of CPAs' director of auditing and attestation, Chuck Landes has guided the Auditing Standards Board through the upheavals of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and in late October, he saw the board issue 11 inaugural standards for the audits of private companies."This was a monumental meeting," Landes said of the most recent ASB meeting. "I am just thrilled. I'm very proud of the technical staff, who have worked very hard and are finally seeing the fruits of all their labor come to fruition in the issuance of these new auditing standards. These standards make significant changes in how some auditors perform their work, and clearly they will improve the quality of auditing."

The Financial Services Authority, re gulator of financial service providers in the U.K., has expressed worries about the systemic risk that comes with the dominance of the Big Four accounting firms.

KPMG LLP has been selected by the YAI/National Institute for People with Disabilities Network as its 2005 Corporation of the Year. Past honorees include Pfizer, Avon Products, RJR Nabisco and Time.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will meet prior to the Thanksgiving holiday in order to address a number of items.

In one of his last public speaking appearances before stepping down as chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board November 30, William McDonough told a roomful of financial and accounting executives that, while much progress had been made in restoring public confidence, maintenance is an ongoing mission.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released critical inspection reports for the audits of PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young, saying that the firms' work has so many deficiencies, their evaluations of companies' finances may be questionable.

Financial Executives Research Foundation, the research affiliate of Financial Executives International, has released two new reports on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance and management reports on internal controls.

By a wide majority, the Senate passed legislation to hopefully strengthen corporate pension programs and provide aid to pension insurance agencies already in debt. A similar bill rewriting pension rules has received approval from two House committees.

There is a clear link between Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 compliance work and dramatically higher profiles for senior tax executives, particularly with audit committees and boards of directors, according to a survey of senior tax executives conducted by KPMG.

The Securities and Exchange Commission's 2005 financial statements got a clean bill of health from the Government Accountability Office, after the SEC accelerated its financial reporting schedule to issue the documents.

Louisiana has chosen Deloitte & Touche to provide oversight of the state's receipt and delivery of federal aid recovery funds.

Bail was denied to one of the former KPMG partners charged by the federal government in connection with the sale of allegedly fraudulent tax shelters.

More than two-thirds of all small businesses favor setting different Sarbanes-Oxley compliance standards for small and large companies, according to a recent study commissioned by SAP America Inc.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox named Scott Taub as the agency's acting chief accountant.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced new appointments and re-appointments to its Standing Advisory Group for 2006.