Tammy Whitehouse

A speech by a staffer at the Securities and Exchange Commission has set off a cascade of warnings to auditors to watch for “valuation manipulation,” as a new standard allowing more discretionary use of fair value accounting takes effect. Joe Kroeker, deputy chief accountant for the SEC, told a recent New York conference on principles-based […]

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board says audits of internal controls over financial reporting are improving—but they still are not focusing as much on risk and efficiency as regulators would like. In a report issued last week to review second-year compliance with Auditing Standard No. 2, the Board said that in some cases auditors still […]

Compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and the state of auditing internal controls over financial reporting might be top-of-mind for accounting executives across the land these days, but occasionally the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board does tackle other business. Such was the Board’s agenda last week, when it proposed a new auditing standard that would address how auditors […]

If companies must continue issuing quarterly earnings guidance, they should at least consider following a standard template to improve transparency and comparability, say two corporate think tanks that have gone through the trouble of drafting a template. The CFA Institute Centre for Financial Market Integrity and the Business Roundtable Institute for Corporate Ethics have jointly […]

In the context of a long-range project to rewrite the rules for business-performance reporting, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided the new system it eventually develops will no longer allow a line item for “cash equivalents.” The category has become closely scrutinized in recent years as audit firms questioned whether companies were inappropriately including […]

When the Securities and Exchange Commission gave companies a free pass last fall to fix old, accumulated errors without issuing a major restatement, companies lined up to take advantage of the opportunity. And now that the first annual reports following that guidance are starting to appear, it seems that Corporate America had very little to […]

For a rare, brief moment in financial-reporting time, companies will have some new latitude to cherry pick fair-value accounting treatments–reporting this liability at fair value but that one at historical cost–in a way that might cast a blinding spotlight on a picture of fiscal health. But will they do so with only appearances in mind? […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission has given some new–but so far informal–guidance on how it wants companies to assess the effectiveness of hedge transactions to ensure that they qualify for favorable, highly complex derivative accounting treatment. At a recent meeting of the Emerging Issues Task Force of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, Joe McGrath, a […]

A new study suggests that stock option grant data being used to support allegations of backdating may not necessarily be as incriminating as first believed. A group of consultants with NERA Consulting, an economic analysis firm, has published the third installment of a four-part series analyzing stock grant data to verify assertions that some companies […]