Regulatory actions and programs

The Securities and Exchange Commission has begun sending letters to public companies that fail to file their financials with all the necessary data using Extensible Business Reporting Language technology.

The International Federation of Accountants and the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy have developed a new International Framework for Good Governance in the Public Sector to encourage more effective public sector governance.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released staff guidance to help auditors of brokers and dealers registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to plan and perform audits in accordance with PCAOB standards as mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act and SEC rules.

Thomson Reuters has released a special report examining the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s new standards affecting broker-dealer audits.

The Center for Audit Quality has released findings from a collaborative effort by members of the public company auditing profession to field test certain aspects of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s auditor’s reporting model proposal.

It is widely acknowledged that fraud, including fraudulent financial reporting and other improprieties targeted against businesses, has become epidemic.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has made public additional portions of a 2010 inspection report on Ernst & Young and 2008 and 2009 inspections of Grant Thornton because the firms failed to adequately address some of the quality control problems that the PCAOB had identified within a year, although Grant Thornton claims the problems have since been addressed.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board adopted a new auditing standard Tuesday, along with amendments to other auditing standards, to require auditors to pay more attention to three critical areas of the audit: related-party transactions, significant unusual transactions, and a company’s financial relationships and transactions with its executive officers.

Christopher Cox, the former Securities and Exchange Commission chairman whose support for converging International Financial Reporting Standards with U.S. GAAP was crucial in setting up a “roadmap” for harmonizing the two sets of accounting standards, has reversed course.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board is continuing to find a high degree of problems in audits of broker-dealers, despite some improvements, according to PCAOB member Jeanette Franzel.

International Business Machines Corp. said the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t plan to recommend enforcement action against the company after probing how it reports revenue from offsite cloud services.

Chinese affiliates of the four largest accounting companies and U.S. regulators have been discussing a settlement in a dispute over access to audit documents belonging to the firms’ clients.

Public companies have begun filing their first set of reports on so-called “conflict minerals” with the Securities and Exchange Commission to meet a deadline Monday, but advocacy groups are finding the reports are not providing much information so far.

A roundup of resent news in audit and attest.

Public companies are confronting significant new compliance challenges from a combination of Sarbanes-Oxley requirements, Public Company Accounting Oversight Board inspections of their auditing firms, and COSO’s new internal control framework, according to a new survey.

A group of technology companies sent a letter Wednesday to leaders of the House Financial Services Committee objecting to legislation that would exempt companies with under $250 million in annual revenue from existing requirements to file financial statements as machine-readable open data.

Paychex has a list of the top 10 regulatory issues facing small businesses this year.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has denied an emergency motion by the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable to stay the Securities and Exchange Commission’s conflict minerals rule under the Dodd-Frank Act requiring companies to disclose their use of minerals such as tungsten and tin mined in war-torn areas of Africa like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released staff guidance on how the PCAOB should perform an economic analysis as part of its standard-setting process.

Paul Beswick, who has served as chief accountant in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Chief Accountant, plans to leave the agency to return to the private sector.