Regulatory actions and programs

Let’s not kid ourselves. Financial statement auditing as we know it is facing a crisis of relevance in today’s capital markets.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced that it is accepting applications for research fellowships for next year.

For publicly traded companies, the audit process is among the more arduous and mundane of all corporate responsibilities.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has been conducting a review of the effectiveness of financial disclosures by public companies within and outside of financial statements and some investors have wondered about where forward-looking statements should fit into them.

Public companies paid on average $7.1 million in audit fees, according to a new survey, representing an increase of 4.5 percent over last year’s audit fees paid.

Cindy Fornelli, executive director of the Center for Audit Quality, discusses the impact of regulatory and policy changes on financial restatements since Sarbanes-Oxley, in an interview with Accounting Today editor-in-chief Dan Hood.

A roundup of recent audit and assurance news.

Financial instrument accounting is on the verge of major changes.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued an order instituting proceedings against Mayer Hoffman McCann, an auditing firm associated with CBIZ, after it found that one of MHM’s audit and attest clients, Tradebot Systems, a high-frequency trading broker-dealer, had traded CBIZ stock.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Bank of America Corporation with violating the internal controls and recordkeeping provisions of the federal securities laws after the bank assumed a large portfolio of structured notes and other financial instruments as part of its acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

The European Union will step up its probe of Apple Inc.’s tax arrangements in Ireland, revealing why it suspects the iPhone maker received an unfair advantage.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Silicon Valley software company and two former executives in an accounting fraud where timesheets were falsified to hit quarterly financial targets.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Monday an expected award of more than $30 million to an unidentified whistleblower who provided key original information that led to a successful SEC enforcement action.

An industry group is urging the House to postpone a vote on legislation that would scale back Securities and Exchange Commission requirements for companies to file their financial statements using Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL, technology.

Regulators have been clamping down on auditors of broker-dealers in recent years in response to the lack of meaningful audits of Bernard Madoff’s investment firm and other scandals uncovered during the financial crisis.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released a new alert from the PCAOB staff warning auditors about deficiencies that have been seen in audits of revenue figures.

A roundup of audit and accounting news from the previous month

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has released a proposed 2015 GAAP Financial Reporting Taxonomy for public review and comment, containing computer-readable financial reporting labels coded in Extensible Business Reporting Language, or XBRL.

The receipt of a comment letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission induces many top executives to start selling shares in their companies before the letters are released to the public, according to a new study.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Friday it has issued a whistleblower award of more than $300,000 to a company employee who performed audit and compliance functions and reported wrongdoing to the SEC after the company failed to take action when the employee reported it internally.