Regulatory actions and programs

After a six-month vacancy, the Securities and Exchange Commission is zeroing in on a new chairman for the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, according to published reports.

The new risk assessment standards are all about getting back to basics, said expert Hiriam Hasty while speaking at the New York State Society of CPAs' annual Accounting and Auditing in the Nonpublic Environment Conference.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a status report with the U.S. Court of Appeals, saying that it will again ask for public comment on its independence proposal for the boards of most mutual funds.

For the first time, Securities and Exchange Commission information about companies and mutual funds is now fully searchable online.

Intuit Inc. is among the latest companies receiving an informal inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its stock option granting practices.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's top auditor offered some suggestions for the third year of life under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, while speaking at the 25th Annual Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Reporting Institute Conference on June 8.

Victor Hugo once wrote that the one thing more powerful than all the armies on earth was an idea whose time has come.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the American Institute of CPAs issued a proposal aimed at improving the financial reporting process for private companies.

The profits of companies with difficult-to-read annual reports are lower in following years, according to a study by a University of Michigan business professor.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has filed securities fraud charges against three former executives of national restaurant chain Buca Inc., which operates the Buca di Beppo and Vinny T's of Boston national restaurant chains.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced that securities lawyer Andrew N. Vollmer will serve as the agency's deputy general counsel.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced that it has scheduled a Standing Advisory Group meeting for June 12 and 13 in Washington.

The European Union's sales tax losses, now loosely estimated to have reached $120 billion per year and continuing to grow, are causing deepening concern among tax consultant professionals in Europe.In the U.S., high rates of sales tax losses due to exemptions on Internet shopping across state boundaries cost the authorities only a fraction of the losses in the EU, because rates are low compared with Europe's equivalent rates, which center around 20 percent.

With quixotic courage, the Governmental Accounting Standards Board has issued a preliminary views document on one of accounting's most confounding issues - reporting on derivatives.The suggested standard would require governmental financial statements to report derivatives at fair value in the balance sheet, unless the instrument is effectively hedging the risk that it was issued to offset. In such cases, the derivative's fair value would be reported in the balance sheet as either deferred charges or deferred credits, with no effect of fair value changes on the change statement.

In its first exercise of a new due process policy, the Financial Accounting Standards Board's Emerging Issues Task Force has issued three exposure drafts of proposed consensuses. The documents deal with accounting for contingently convertible, or CoCo, financial instruments, sabbaticals, and taxes.In the past, the task force has issued exposure drafts only when an issue seemed controversial or significant enough to warrant public comment. Under the new due process, all task force abstracts will be exposed for comment before being submitted to the board for final ratification.

IVAX RETAINS PWC: Ivax Diagnostics Inc., a Miami-based manufacturer and marketer of scientific instruments, medical diagnostic and autoimmune kits, has retained Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers as its independent accountant.PwC succeeds Ernst & Young as Ivax's auditor.

After months of lobbying from businesses, it's beginning to appear that there's been some progress made in getting the Securities and Exchange Commission to reconsider parts of a proposal requiring companies to disclose the earnings of executives.

In a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court said that public employees do not have blanket rights to file lawsuits as part of whistleblower protections outlined under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

President Bush has nominated the chairman and chief executive of investment banking firm Goldman Sachs, Henry M. Paulson Jr., as Treasury Secretary.

I couldn't believe the number of American Idol votes. The voters couldn't have been just those in their teens and twenties. Perhaps it isn't a coincidence that the votes were being cast as I was flying back from attending the AICPA Spring Council meeting in Salt Lake City.