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Accounting And Auditing

Below is some of the most recent Compliance Week coverage on issues related to accounting and auditing. Coverage focuses on developments emanating from FASB and the PCAOB—on issues as diverse as FIN 48, “fair value,” auditor independence and more—but extends to broader financial reporting issues as well. The list below shows the most recent articles first.

  Title & Description Date Type of Article
1. Concerns on Comparability for IFRS Statements
Comparability is vital to the folks who use financial statements to make investment decisions—but those people may be forced to lower their expectations when U.S. companies ultimately adopt international accounting rules.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
11/18/08 Compliance Week Coverage
2. FASB Renews Attempts to Amend QSPE Rules
As debate continues over the role of fair-value measurement in the ongoing financial crisis, the Financial Accounting Standards Board is turning its attention to off-balance-sheet treatment of complex financial instruments, another accounting problem that played a supporting role in the meltdown.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
11/11/08 Compliance Week Coverage
3. How to Handle FASB’s Unfair Value Standard
I had planned to write a completely different column for this month—but, much like the Treasury Department, was inspired by recent events regarding the credit crisis to change course.
 By Colleen Cunningham
11/04/08 Columns & Editorials
4. IASB Vice Chairman Vocal Proponent of Fair Value
As the debate rages on over whether fair-value accounting is the root cause of the credit crisis and how best to address concerns about its application, a member of the International Accounting Standards Board has stepped up to defend the accounting method in a speech before a group of U.S. securities analysts.
 By Melissa Klein Aguilar
11/04/08 Compliance Week Coverage
5. New Ideas, Debate on Fair-Value Struggle
The raging debate over how to use fair-value accounting in periods of credit turmoil has lurched forward again, with a new idea to split stated values into component parts—an approach that has intrigued the Securities and Exchange Commission.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
11/04/08 Compliance Week Coverage
6. Auditors Brace for Legal Backlash in Credit Crisis
As the credit crisis rocks financial markets, audit firms are bracing for the inevitable onslaught of litigation and shifting personnel to prepare for new service demands.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
10/28/08 Compliance Week Coverage
7. IASB’s Relaxed Fair-Value Rules Relieve EU Banks
The International Accounting Standards Board has published new, relaxed rules for fair-value accounting, a victory for floundering European banks that left IASB insisting it remains committed to the fair-value treatment of all financial assets in the long term.
 By Neil Baker
10/21/08 Compliance Week Coverage
8. New SEC Accounting Rule Softens Blow for Banking Sector
The Securities and Exchange Commission has tossed another bone to the banking sector, giving its blessing to an accounting maneuver that will soften the blow to third-quarter reports.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
10/21/08 Compliance Week Coverage
9. Non-profits Face Form 990 Changes, Challenges
Board members at non-profit groups are under the gun this year to adopt modern governance principles, including disclosure of possible conflicts of interest or risks of fraud within their organization.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
10/14/08 Compliance Week Coverage
10. The Rest of Fair Value’s Problems
While regulators are bowing to demands for more guidance on fair-value accounting in relation to the credit crisis, many other questions surrounding fair-value measurement will be left for the markets to sort out themselves.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
10/07/08 Compliance Week Coverage
11. Congress, Regulators Spar on Fair-Value Accounting
Fair value accounting became the political whipping boy in the federal bank bailout package last week, with cries all over Capitol Hill to suspend it, to leave it alone, or offer better explanations of how to use it.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
10/07/08 Compliance Week Coverage
12. How the PCAOB Fares After Five Years on the Job
It has been more than six years since the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board was created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, five years since the Securities and Exchange Commission declared the PCAOB operational, and four years since the PCAOB started its first inspections of registered public accounting firms. The PCAOB’s work, in combination with other changes in the capital markets, has significantly increased confidence in financial statement audits. And the PCAOB board members and staff have shown themselves to be capable, dedicated, and devoted to their important public policy role.
 By Scott Taub
09/30/08 Compliance Week Coverage
13. Companies Welcome Off-Balance Sheet Reforms
Just as the federal government engineers historic bailouts for financial giants like Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and insurer AIG, an accounting rule proposal aims to end the kind of off-balance-sheet accounting that contributed to such spectacular demise.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
09/23/08 Compliance Week Coverage
14. FAS 157, 141R: Tricky Combination for Non-Financials
As chaotic as the new rules for fair-value accounting have been so far, the financial reporting community can expect still more heartburn ahead.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
09/16/08 Compliance Week Coverage
15. ARS; Business Merger Guidance; ERM
The market for auction rate securities has been seized up for months, but ARS holders continue to paint very different pictures about the value and long-term prospects for their securities, according to an analysis of 600 public company filings.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
09/03/08 Compliance Week Coverage
16. Convergence May Cloud Options Treatment
In the grand scheme of migrating from U.S. accounting rules to International Financial Reporting Standards, stock options might seem like an area where the accounting won’t change all that much.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
09/03/08 Compliance Week Coverage
17. Experts: Take Advantage of IFRS Training
U.S. capital markets are beginning to mobilize for a massive back-to-school exercise—accounting school, that is.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/26/08 Compliance Week Coverage
18. KPMG Gets Inspected; PCAOB News; More
KPMG has become the latest major audit firm to take heat from the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board over a handful of audit missteps.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/26/08 Compliance Week Coverage
19. EPS Tweaks; Fraud Guidance; GAO on Taxes
The Financial Accounting Standard Board and its international counterpart have lurched forward yet again in their quest to converge rules for calculating earnings per share.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/19/08 Compliance Week Coverage
20. Fears Over Contingency Accounting
Plans to overhaul accounting for corporations’ potential problems are driving yet another wedge between Corporate America and shareholder activists. The eye of the storm this time: lawsuits.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/19/08 Compliance Week Coverage
21. Are New Regs Effective? Peer Reviews; More
A new academic study gives credence to what many already suspect about new regulations: they almost always produce secondary, unintended changes in company behavior.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/12/08 Compliance Week Coverage
22. FASB on Balance Sheet Reforms; More
The Financial Accounting Standards Board has agreed to stall some reforms meant to clean up off-balance-sheet accounting, a reluctant admission that the Board can’t move quickly enough to fix the problem by 2009 as originally planned.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/05/08 Compliance Week Coverage
23. Clean Sheet or Topside Tweaking for IFRS?
Although a clear path toward adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in the United States hasn’t been established, the largest public companies are already mulling their approach toward converting to a new accounting system.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
08/05/08 Compliance Week Coverage
24. Reaching a Fair Settlement on Fair Value
In the year I’ve been writing for Compliance Week, one subject I haven’t broached is fair-value accounting. I'm not alone; the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee to Improve Financial Reporting has decided not to touch it either, while offering recommendations on all manner of other nettlesome problems. Nonetheless, the debate continues over fair value versus historical cost accounting. Since I’ve seemingly heard every argument on all sides of this debate, it’s probably time for me to speak up, too.
 By Scott Taub
07/29/08 Columns & Editorials
25. FIN 48 Non-compliance; Audit Reform; More
More than one quarter of large public companies are not meeting the disclosure requirements for tax reserves required under the controversial, tell-all accounting rule Financial Interpretation No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/29/08 Compliance Week Coverage
26. How the Tax Executives Should Approach IFRS
As a U.S. transition to international accounting standards appears more and more inevitable, corporate tax departments need to get a seat at the table to assure they’re included in the monumental planning process that is beginning to unfold.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/22/08 Compliance Week Coverage
27. FAS 140 Reforms; Audit Standards; More
In its work to revise accounting rules around transfers of assets and liabilities, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided to remove an exception that allowed companies under certain conditions to skip the fair value measurement if they determine such measurement can’t be done.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/22/08 Compliance Week Coverage
28. Audit Inspections; Auction Securities; IFRS
PricewaterhouseCoopers and Crowe Chizek are the latest auditing firms taken to task by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board for shoddy audit practices in 2007.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/15/08 Compliance Week Coverage
29. Much Talk, Little Action on Fair-Value Mess
The debate over how to define and present fair value in financial statements plunged last week to the core of accounting theory: whether accounting should reflect business decisions, or drive them.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/15/08 Compliance Week Coverage
30. PCAOB Inspections; Fears on Contingencies
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board got an earful recently about how much it should rely on other countries’ regulators to carry out its duty to regulate audit firms doing business in U.S. capital markets.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/08/08 Compliance Week Coverage
31. Audit Firms Push (Again) for Liability Caps
Audit firms are making their case to the Treasury Department to provide public policy recommendations that would relieve what the audit firms describe as a risky, unfair exposure to legal damages.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/08/08 Compliance Week Coverage
32. Giving Finance Dept. the Audit It Deserves
Usually I write a column about how to audit some aspect of a whole enterprise—say, how the company manages risk, or how executives invest their IT dollars. That’s important. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the nuts and bolts: Companies are run by specific departments doing specific jobs, and they need auditing too. So we’re going to get back to our internal auditing roots this month, starting with the finance department.
 By Dan Swanson, Compliance Week Columnist
07/01/08 Columns & Editorials
33. FASB’s Agenda; New EPS Guidance; More
Companies can expect to see a series of roundtables at the Financial Accounting Standards Board later this year to debate some of the biggest accounting challenges on FASB’s agenda.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/01/08 Compliance Week Coverage
34. How to Prepare for the IFRS Tsunami
Death, taxes—and now, conversion to international accounting standards. It’s that real.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
07/01/08 Compliance Week Coverage
35. Preferred Stock; Rethinking M&A; More
Brace for bigger liabilities on the balance sheet and a larger ratio of liabilities to equity if the Financial Accounting Standards Board stays the course in redefining preferred stock as a liability.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/24/08 Compliance Week Coverage
36. FASB Wrestles With ‘Sold’ vs. ‘Transferred’
When accounting rulemakers say they want to get back to basics on good financial reporting, they mean it: The rules will soon contain new directives on how to define “sold.”
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/24/08 Compliance Week Coverage
37. IASB Forms Working Panel on Fair-Value Rules
The International Accounting Standards Board has formed an expert advisory panel to better examine the controversial issue of valuing securities in illiquid markets.
 By Jaclyn Jaeger
06/24/08 Compliance Week Coverage
38. FASB Tries to Reform Hedges, Contingencies
A simpler rule for hedge accounting is on the horizon, but don’t place any bets that the rule will actually make hedge accounting, you know, simpler.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/17/08 Compliance Week Coverage
39. PCAOB to Push Auditors; Insurance Rules
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has adopted two new rules to keep a closer eye on auditing firms, including one that requires firms to provide a comprehensive report of their doings to the PCAOB annually.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/17/08 Compliance Week Coverage
40. More Ideas on Audit Reform; Joint Frameworks
A Treasury Department advisory committee has published a new set of recommendations to reform the auditing industry, this time tackling sensitive subjects such as litigation reform, the content of the auditor’s report, and transparency of the audit firms themselves.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/10/08 Compliance Week Coverage
41. How Merger Rules May Nick Earnings; More
New accounting rules forcing companies to capitalize research costs will boost net income and total assets at the time of a business acquisition but then pinch future income, especially for companies in research-intensive sectors, according to a recent study.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/03/08 Compliance Week Coverage
42. Bad News for Goodwill Writedowns
It won’t be long before the next wave of corporate writedowns begins—this time gutting the balance sheet of “goodwill” that has accumulated from old mergers or acquisitions.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
06/03/08 Compliance Week Coverage
43. How Fair Value Works When Liquidity Dries Up
My name is Colleen Cunningham, and I weigh 7 pounds, 2 ounces—at least, I do if you go by historical cost accounting.
 By Colleen Cunningham
05/28/08 Columns & Editorials
44. Boosting IFRS Education; Guidance Galore
The Big 4 accounting firms are lending their global expertise to universities to improve accounting education on International Financial Reporting Standards, just as the profession plans to update its standards for passing the Certified Public Accountant exam.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
05/28/08 Compliance Week Coverage
45. FASB May Adopt IFRS for Tax Accounting
As the movement toward international accounting standards kicks into high gear, the Financial Accounting Standards Board may be planning to set aside certain portions of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and simply adopt the international equivalent.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
05/28/08 Compliance Week Coverage
46. FASB Tries to Untangle Trio of GAAP Twists
Accounting executives now have a new roadmap for navigating Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, specifying which GAAP literature carries authority over what.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
05/20/08 Compliance Week Coverage
47. Struggling on Values, Banks Fire at FAS 157
As liquidity and earnings continue to go down the drain in a flood of first-quarter earnings reports, bankers are stepping up their appeal to regulators to help rein in fair value accounting—and investor advocates are preparing to stand their ground.


By Tammy Whitehouse

05/20/08 Compliance Week Coverage
48. Drafting an Effective Internal Audit Charter
At the request of subscribers, Compliance Week offers a Remediation Center, in which readers can submit questions—anonymously—to securities and accounting experts. Compliance Week’s editors will review all questions and then submit them—confidentially, of course—to specialists who can address the issues. The questions and responses will then be reprinted in a future edition of Compliance Week. Below is one of the Q&As; ask your own questions by clicking here.
 By Sanjay Anand
05/13/08 Compliance Week Coverage
49. ESOARS in Flux; FAS 157 Tempest; PCAOB
An innovative but fledgling security meant to establish market values for employee stock options may have hit a critical speed bump on the road to viability.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
05/13/08 Compliance Week Coverage
50. Cos. Face Auction Rate Insecurities
As the epitaphs are written on the market for auction rate securities, corporate investors are left to struggle with how to clean up the mess they’ve created for their balance sheets and income statements.
 By Tammy Whitehouse
05/13/08 Compliance Week Coverage

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