Blog Profile / Accounting Watchdog
| URL : | http://blogs.forbes.com/francinemckenna/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Business & Finance | |
| Posts on Regator: | 131 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.1 | |
| Archived Since: | February 24, 2011 | |
Blog Post Archive
Ernst & Young Seizes Tax Transparency Issue But Advocacy May Break SEC Rules
You can't blame global accounting firm Ernst & Young for seizing a big business opportunity. Tax transparency reporting is coming, whether multinationals like it or not, and Ernst & Young is ready to help.
Buffett’s Gentle Ribbing About Swiss Re Dispute More Like Fibbing
9:27 am SwissRe settlement by David Benoit Buffett says the company settled a “disagreement” with SwissRe and both sides marked big gains on the settlement. He promises, with tongue firmly planted in his cheek, to get into more of these disagreements if they help both sides so well. Wall Street Journal Live Blog: Berkshire Hathaway’s Annual [...]
Las Vegas Sands Can Now Hire A Chinese Auditor
The Las Vegas, Nevada office of PricewaterhouseCoopers resigned April 23 as auditor of casino company Las Vegas Sands, according to an SEC filing. PwC has been signing the opinion for Las Vegas Sands since its IPO in 2004. A Wall Street Journal anonymous source says “the legal and regulatory scrutiny of Las Vegas Sands was “the overriding issue” [...]
KPMG’s Inside Trader: What The Auditor, and Skechers, Don’t Want To Talk About
Much has been written about Scott London, the KPMG partner in charge of the firm’s southern California audit practice, and his illegal and career-limiting-move of passing inside information to a jeweler buddy. KPMG may be sorry, at this point, for starting the ball rolling April 8 with its press release. Deloitte hid Vice Chairman Flanagan’s [...]
KPMG Statement On Scott London Criminal and Civil Charges
I asked KPMG spokesman Seth Oster for a statement on KPMG’s next steps and further investigation given the more extensive charges leveled against Scott London by the Department of Justice and the SEC. I received this statement this evening. (Emphasis mine.) STATEMENT FROM KPMG CHAIRMAN & CEO JOHN VEIHMEYER KPMG LLP Chairman and CEO [...]
Another “Rogue” Audit Partner; Another “Duped” Audit Firm
There are things you anticipate, worry about, know will be troublesome once they happen. It’s safe to say global audit firm KPMG wasn’t worrying it would someday hear the leader of its audit practice was passing confidential client information to someone else who then traded on it. KPMG announced late Monday via press release that [...]
GAO Blames Regulators For Faulty Foreclosure Reviews But That’s Not The Whole Story
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) will soon issue its report of the second phase of an examination of the OCC/Fed sponsored mortgage servicer foreclosure review process. In 2011, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (Federal Reserve), and the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) [...]
JPMorgan Chase Still Haunted By Foreclosure Reviews, And More
Last week Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess at the New York Times DealBook catalogued the trials and tribulations of JPMorgan and, in particular, its CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon. The list of woes grows by the day. It was gratifying to me to see major media now noticing the chink in Dimon’s armor. I called [...]
No Accounting For Auditor PwC At Levin’s Whale Hearing
You might think that when shareholders pay a firm $105.5 million in audit and audit-related fees for an opinion on whether the financial statements presented fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of & Co. and its subsidiaries, private equity funds, commingled trust funds and special purpose vehicles at year end, that audit firm,, would [...]
PCAOB Criticizes Quality At PwC; Nothing Happens
Big news last week in the breathless world of audits and auditors. The audit regulator, the Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board – even the word “oversight” should get you excited – published its private criticisms of PricewaterhouseCoopers poor quality audit work for not one but two audit years, 2007 and 2008. If those years [...]
Even A Big Four Audit Can’t Nail Down Kingdom Holdings Numbers
Late yesterday I got an email from FORBES Billionaire List editor Kerry Dolan looking for expertise in accounting and disclosure requirements for listings on the stock exchange. Yes, you heard that right. (Once you’re known as the “accounting expert” you get all kinds of questions.) Kerry was wrapping up her magazine feature story, “Prince Alwaleed [...]
A Legal Secret Weapon May Help Hold Deloitte US Firm Liable for ChinaCast Fraud
ChinaCast was a company traded on NASDAQ that has a significant number of US investors. The company’s operations, providing post-secondary education and e-learning services, are in. According to a recently filed lawsuit, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu CPA Ltd (DTTC) in Beijing, Peoples Republic of signed the ChinaCast audit opinion but not until, according to the complaint, [...]
Academy Still Counting On PwC to Pick Oscar Winners
sent out the same old Academy Awards press release last week, touting the firm’s record for no security breaches in the 79 years working with the Oscars in the balloting process. But if everything finally goes fairly smoothly this year, most of the credit belongs to new electronic voting vendor Everyone Counts, Inc.. The Academy [...]
All Talk: The SEC’s Broken Broker-Dealer, Investment Advisor Examination Program
On February 21, the Office of Compliance and Examinations at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission published its, “Examination Priorities for 2013?. The report includes a description of the regulatory review priorities for 11,000...Show More Summary
Nothing For Nothing: HP Pays Dearly For Ernst & Young Tax Testimony
Last September Senator Carl Levin’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations called auditor to DC to explain how its client HP moves profits offshore to avoid taxes. Beth Carr, the partner responsible for the tax-related services provided to audit client HP, testified on behalf of . ’s testimony cost HP almost $2 million dollars, according to HP’s latest proxy. [...]
Audit Firm Rotation: Maybe Make A Switch When The Government Takes Over
Mandatory audit firm rotation was an old tune sung again by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, the audit industry regulator, beginning in August of 2011. The regulator’s chorus – too-long audit firm tenure breeds a lack of professional skepticism and inhibits auditor independence – almost always fell on deaf ears. Audit firms and their [...]
Clients Flounder And Fail But Auditor PwC Prevails
LLP audits several companies in the news recently but the global professional services firm seems to have escaped scrutiny for those clients’ serious missteps. Watchdog PwC never warned investors of faulty management and fraud that’s tanked shares, forced out top executives and resulted in expensive, ongoing private, civil, and potential criminal litigation. LLP is, for [...]
JP Morgan Chase Named A New Chief Auditor; Can You Name Him?
Wondering what JP Morgan Chase and really think of internal audit and the role of Chief Auditor? Take a look at how the bank handled Pat Hurst’s promotion. Who is Pat Hurst? He’s the bank’s new General Auditor according to the “Task Force Report”, an internal investigation prompted by the multi-billion “whale” trade losses earlier [...]
PwC Ensures Oscar Ballot Integrity In “Partnership” With Everyone Counts LLC
LLC, the global audit firm, is heavily invested in the success of the Academy Awards. PwC is well-known as the “accountants” to the Academy since 1935. But the service PwC is most famous for – safeguarding Academy members’ ballots for the awards and keeping results of that tally top secret - is one the firm provides, apparently, [...]
Settling The Foreclosure Reviews: Winners And Losers
Who says there’s no recovery? Monday’s announcement of an “agreement in principle” to end the foreclosure reviews at ten of the fourteen mortgage servicing companies provided a neat recovery for the banks, and their ‘independent” consultants, mired in an expensive, seemingly unending project from hell. Show More Summary