Tammy Whitehouse

On the long and winding road toward convergence with international accounting standards, the Financial Accounting Standards Board is rethinking how companies should look back at prior periods based on the adoption of new accounting rules. In its project with the International Accounting Standards Board to achieve short-term convergence on certain rules, FASB plans to require […]

With its role in public company reporting diminished in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is turning its attention to private company accounting, recommending standard setters begin a process of evaluating and potentially rewriting Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to make financial reporting more useful for private companies. An AICPA task force […]

A recent roundtable with the Standing Advisory Group of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board became the stage for a debate over whether auditors should issue more information in their audit reports than the standard “pass/fail” assessment. Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said she favors more detail because […]

The Internal Revenue Service is chasing down scores of companies and their executives who participated in a stock option tax shelter scheme to settle up their tax bills. In many cases the tax service was sold to corporate officers by audit firms attesting to the financial statements, representing just the kind of tax service that […]

One-third of the limited number of inspection reports so far published by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board have identified deficiencies in select audit engagements. In two cases, reports note that the inspection process ultimately led to an issuer’s restatement of financials. Fewer than a dozen inspection reports completed in 2004 have been posted online […]