Regulatory actions and programs

Are you able to get what you need from reviewing financial statements? Do you think there are ways to enhance the usefulness of the presentation of the information?If you have ever experienced frustration in your attempts to glean information from financial statements, take note. The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have joined together in a proposal to improve the look and feel of financial statements.

Two former KPMG managers received prison terms and multimillion-dollar fines in a long-running tax shelter case.

Accounting experts and industry organizations alternately praised and panned the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s decision to loosen the standards for fair value and mark-to-market accounting.

Lawmakers at a congressional hearing Wednesday pressed Internal Revenue Service Commissioner Douglas Shulman to ease up on audits of small businesses.

Under pressure from Congress to act quickly, the Financial Accounting Standards Board voted to approve substantial changes to fair value accounting.

The Center for Audit Quality plans to award $200,000 in research grant funds to academics working on topics related to auditing and accounting.

A new report suggests that companies adopting the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s recent proposals on modifying mark-to-market and fair value accounting standards should provide more extensive disclosures to help investors make sense of the impaired assets.

CFOs at U.S. companies expect that the transition to International Financial Reporting Standards will give them the ability to transform their finance departments, according to a new survey, but the price tag could be high.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has bowed to pressure from lawmakers and banking interests and put forward a proposal to relax fair value standards.

A searing report from the Government Accountability Office has charged the Small Business Administration with poor controls and oversight that resulted in a number of companies receiving undeserved funds from a program designed to boost small businesses in underserved communities.

The Obama administration will ask the Economic Recovery Advisory Board, led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, to form a task force to recommend an overhaul of the tax code.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner proposed a sweeping revamp of government regulatory powers over the nation’s financial system highlighted by establishing a single agency “with responsibility for systemic stability over the major institutions and critical payment and settlement systems and activities.”

More than 40 percent of internal auditors within the financial services sector felt that better risk management practices could have helped prevent their organization’s current financial situation, according to a just-released study from the Institute of Internal Auditors.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner did his best at filling in the blanks on the Obama administration’s plan for cleaning up the so-called “toxic assets” clogging the balance sheets of banks.

In a hearing before the House Financial Services Committee, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner asked lawmakers to grant the Treasury Department more power to seize failing financial firms.

About 89 percent of the 150 audit committee members at a recent KPMG conference said that the financial crisis had caused their company’s board or audit committee to change the nature and scope of its oversight.

Audits by the Internal Revenue Service of the tax returns of millionaires nosedived in the just-ended fiscal year, according to a new report.

Financial restatements in 2008 dipped 49 percent from the prior year, the lowest level in the past five years, according to a report compiled by proxy researcher Glass Lewis.

Global CPA and business-advisory firm Grant Thornton is gearing to launch a new practice unit — hedge fund internal control, governance and regulatory compliance services.

Ernst & Young and Swiss bank UBS have been sued by a group of investors in Luxembourg who put money in a fund that directed 95 percent of their assets to Bernard Madoff’s firm.