Section 404(a) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, together with SEC rules implementing the provisions of the Act, require management to assess and report on the effectiveness of internal control over financial reporting (ICFR). It took a few years for the SEC…
John White, Director of the SECs Division of Corporation Finance, gave a speech at Financial Executives International Global Financial Reporting Convergence Conference last week (June 5, 2008). In no uncertain terms (and with apologies in advance for the bad pun),…
I thought I had beaten flat the CAQ's survey of audit committee members in my last post. Lo and behold, here is one more nasty tidbit brought to my attention that merits sunlight. Among the organizations that with whom CAQ…
Much ado has been made lately of the insubstantial contribution business school professors have made to practice through research. Accounting research of the last forty years, being no exception, was blasted in a commentary in the Chronicle for Higher Education…
Did you know that: The Sarbanes Oxley Act requires the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) to inspect audit firms with one or more public companies as clients at least once every three years, and that firms with more than…
I have a weak spot in my heart for my former students--especially if they were also my tennis or cycling buddies. Chris, of the cycling variety, recently sent me this email message:...So, today I was reading some posts on the…
Jonathan Weil, the accounting and corporate finance columnist for Bloomberg News, has written an excellent column (read it!) on auditors failing to provide going concern qualifications in reports when they are clearly warranted. I want to comment briefly on the…
Auditors are not priests, immune to the temptations of the material world. Many of us have come to realize that even priests are not priests. Granted, the mindset may have been different in 1933. That's when representatives of the accounting…
This is a rather long post, for which I apologize in advance. It is an adaptation of a much more diplomatic comment letter that I wrote to the PCAOB, criticizing its proposed, and ultimately adopted, definitions of 'material weakness' and…
Following an extended comment period, Auditing Standard No. 5, which supersedes AS 2, was approved by the SEC on July 25, 2007. Now that another chapter in the regulatory saga of SOX 404 is complete, it is time once again…