Regulatory actions and programs

Three professional accounting organizations have jointly released new guidelines for combating fraud.

In preparation for the eventual transition to International Financial Reporting Standards, Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has launched a suite of educational products and services to help accounting students learn IFRS fundamentals.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting released a draft of its final report.

Accounting firm Reznick Group has partnered with Palladium Pacific on a service to provide help to real estate lenders, investors, builders and developers with their troubled real estate assets.

CFOS LACK EXPERIENCE WITH IFRSChicago — Nearly 75 percent of CFOs and senior comptrollers have no experience using International Financial Reporting Standards, while 55 percent are unfamiliar with the Extensible Business Reporting Language, according to a new survey by Grant Thornton.

Profitability and being client-focused go hand in hand. Intellectually, all accountants believe this, but they have a hard time identifying specific actions they can take to maximize both profitability and client service. Over the years, I’ve observed specific client-focused activities that correlate to firm profitability.Here are 12 specific things you can do:

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Microtune and two of the Plano, Texas-based technology company's former senior officers with stock options backdating.

The Governmental Accounting Standards Board has issued a new standard aimed at improving how state and local governments report information about derivative instruments in their financial statements.

U.S. corporations and accountants concerned over rising audit costs due to Sarbanes-Oxley requirements may soon have more to worry about — including another spike in audit charges as a result of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s proposed new standard for engagement quality review.The stricter standard, which was initially proposed back in February and would apply to audits of public companies performed under PCAOB standards, is risk-based and designed to ease identification and speed correction of audit deficiencies prior to issuing the auditor’s report.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board issued the latest inspection report of Big Four firm Deloitte & Touche, noting problems with nine audits performed by the firm last year.With two unidentified clients, the PCAOB said that Deloitte failed to identify a departure from generally accepted accounting principles that it should have addressed before issuing its audit report. In both cases, the clients incorrectly concluded that interest rate swaps qualified for hedge accounting using the short-cut method in Statement of Financial Accounting Standards No. 133.

Last month, a survey released by Big Four Firm Deloitte revealed that U.S. companies require just a tad more preparation and training before International Financial Reporting Standards can be adopted. My guess — as a more-than-casual observer of the profession — is that that finding, which polled chief financial officers and other senior-level financial professionals, probably surprised no one.With convergence of U.S. GAAP with IFRS an inevitability, the profession needs to get proactive, as opposed to its traditional reactive pose, in bracing for the eventual by-product of that union — a single set of global accounting standards.

The state of e-services today can be compared to where e-filing was about five years ago.“If you look back five years, what we were saying about e-filing would sound a lot like what we’re saying about e-services today,” said Roger Harris, president of Padgett Business Services and former chair of the Internal Revenue Service Advisory Council. “As practitioners and the IRS worked together, a lot of problems were solved. And today e-filing is the normal way of doing business. It will be the same with e-services.”

Financial guarantee insurance companies stand behind trillions of dollars in financial obligations — including many of the mortgages that have recently fallen into default.So the Securities and Exchange Commission had good reason to call for new disclosures and clarifications of existing accounting and financial reporting standards.

Continuing a theme, this column is another “Mythbuster” that demonstrates the fallacy behind a couple of longstanding arguments against using values in financial statement reporting.In our prior column, we exploded the myth that an asset’s purchase price is a reliable estimate of its original value. We did this by showing that an asset’s market value is not a single point, but a distribution of amounts observed in a number of actual transactions. Because any particular transaction is a nonrandom sample of only one observation out of a large population, it cannot be relied upon to reflect the asset’s fair value.

Never before has the issue of executive compensation garnered as much of the public’s interest as it has in recent years, due in large part to several highly publicized corporate scandals.The backlash from incidents involving top executives at global organizations, and recent changes in Securities and Exchange Commission proxy and accounting rules, have prompted interesting new trends related to how executives and board members within large public companies are being compensated and to what degree.

Non-farm private employment declined by 79,000 jobs in June, according to figures released by payroll giant ADP.

Risk management has become a top concern of audit committee members, according to a new report.

Rules and guidance issued last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have made it easier for companies to cut the time they spend on Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

Impacted by rising prices for such staples as gas and food, nearly eight of 10 small business owners feel the economy is getting worse, according to the Discover Small Business Watch -- the highest level since the SMB survey debuted in August 2006. The monthly poll, which surveys 1,000 small business owners, showed that 53 percent indicated that the economic conditions for their business are getting worse, compared to 47 percent in May, while roughly 58 percent rated the economy as poor, an increase from 50 percent from the prior month. Some 42 percent of small business operators said they have experienced cash-flow issues over the last 90 days, an increase from 39 percent recorded for the previous month.

The Treasury and Internal Revenue Service have issued Revenue Procedure 2008-35, TD 9409, and Reg. 121698-08, which update the rules regarding disclosure of tax return information by tax return preparers.The new rules provide an exception that allows a U.S. tax return preparer to obtain consent from a taxpayer to disclose a taxpayer's Social Security number to a non-U.S. tax return preparer when: The U.S. preparer makes the disclosure through the use of an "adequate data return safeguard;" the non-U.S. preparer receives the SSN via an "adequate data protection safeguard;" and the U.S. preparer verifies the maintenance of the adequate data protection safeguards in the request for the taxpayer's consent.