Wednesday, April 16, 2008 If lawmakers agree the SEC needs its first budget increase in three years, the commission will have realized a roughly 4 percent increase and be able to keep its staff levels the same as fiscal year 2007, Cox testified during an appropriations hearing before a House subcommittee on Wednesday. The SEC currently employs about 3,470 full-timers. Cox Seeks $1B Boost from Congress Labels: Christopher Cox, sec
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Thursday, April 10, 2008 Labels: coso, reference, sec, small business, SOX Life Blog
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Labels: 8-k, CIFR, restatement, sec
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Monday, February 25, 2008 Labels: Commissioner Casey, corporate governance, market competitiveness, sec
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Tuesday, February 05, 2008 Labels: 404, cost and benefits, sec
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Thursday, December 13, 2007 Four members of Financial Executives International (FEI), an association of senior financial executives, are among panelists appearing on the SEC’s IFRS roundtables. FEI members participating on today’s panel are Gregg L. Nelson, VP, Accounting Policy and Financial Reporting at IBM Corporation and Matthew Hilzinger, SVP and Corporate Controller, Exelon Corporation. The December 17 panel includes FEI members Mick Homan, Comptroller, Corporate Accounting, Procter & Gamble Corporation, and Margaret (Peggy) Smyth, VP and Controller, United Technologies Corporation. Homan, Nelson and Smyth are members of FEI’s Committee on Corporate Reporting (CCR). CCR provided a comment letter to the SEC on November 15, in response to SEC’s Concept Release on whether to permit or require U.S. companies to file their financial statements with the SEC in IFRS. “CCR strongly supports providing a choice in the near term to U.S. issuers to prepare financial statements in accordance with IFRS as published by the International Accounting Standards Board,” said the CCR letter, signed by CCR Chair Arnold C. Hanish, EVP and Chief Accounting Officer, Eli Lilly and Co. However, CCR’s letter added, “It is important to acknowledge that the prospect of allowing U.S. companies to file on the basis of IFRS has very different implications for the broad array of U.S. companies that form the membership of FEI.” FEI Members on Panels; FEI Committee on Corporate Reporting Comments on Concept Release
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Monday, November 19, 2007 The Government Accountability Office said Monday that the Securities and Exchange Commission had a material weakness in the internal controls over its financial reporting. The GAO's report said that data related to accounts receivable balances is processed manually at the SEC in a manner that is prone to error and could result in inaccurate financial reporting by the agency. The news is a blow to the SEC, which was criticized by the GAO in 2006 for the same manual processes, but narrowly avoided a material weakness by putting in place extra controls to compensate for them. The GAO said those controls were not effective in 2007.
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Monday, October 22, 2007 Members of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board's advisory group are split on the question of how hard it would be for the auditing profession to adapt to International Financial Reporting Standards. In light of a recent Securities and Exchange Commission proposal that U.S. companies should be given the choice between IFRS and U.S. generally accepted accounting principles, some PCAOB advisers worried that such a choice would overly burden accounting professors who are already strapped for resources. They also questioned whether the International Accounting Standards Board's version of IFRS is of high enough quality to meet U.S. regulators' and investors' expectations. The IASB expressed similar worries on Thursday. The larger accounting firms, however, assured the advisory group that they have been training their staffs on using IFRS. Perhaps surprisingly, a member of the Financial Accounting Standards Board spoke in favor of a move to international standards. PCAOB Told to Plan for Global Standards
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Tuesday, May 29, 2007 Labels: as5, pcaob, sec, small business
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Wednesday, May 23, 2007 Recent talk of overhauling accounting regulations has the potential to turn the business world upside down. Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke argued in favor of the U.S. developing a U.K.-style, principles-based, risk-focused approach in its financial market regulation. This comes only a few weeks after the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, said the U.S. and Europe should be able to achieve a single accounting standard by 2009. But perhaps more urgent, on Wednesday the SEC is expected to release its final guidance to management for implementing Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. The SEC is certainly keeping busy, but is it taking the right approach?
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Saturday, May 19, 2007 For many corporate critics of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the 2002 law has become synonymous with added cost and work. But when they've voiced their frustration with regulators and congressmen, asking them to amend or repeal the law, they're usually talking about just one of its provisions: Section 404. After nearly five years of hearing concerns about uncertainty regarding management's responsibilities under 404 and complaints about burdensome audits under its companion auditing standard, the Securities and Exchange Commission may formally make the first change to the provision before Memorial Day weekend. In back-to-back meetings, the SEC will vote on its proposed management guidance for complying with the internal-control rule on May 23, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will decide whether to adopt its new companion auditing standard on May 24.
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Wednesday, May 16, 2007 In the coming weeks, the Securities and Exchange Commission must decide a series of critical issues worth billions of dollars to the business community: from how far to cut back accounting rules to whether it should side with investment banks or shareholders in a Supreme Court case. The nation's premiere markets watchdog is operating in the wake of complaints that government clamped down too tightly on business practices after financial scandals from Wall Street to Main Street. Several crucial decisions the SEC is about to make will determine the course of financial regulation in the coming year -- and will offer indications about whether the agency will respond to the concerns of either investors or industry. SEC Faces Some Crucial Questions Labels: regulation, sec
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Tuesday, May 08, 2007 Up to now, smaller public companies -- usually those with just less than $75 million in public equity -- have not been required to comply with Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That section requires that a public company's management file a report on its assessment of the company's internal control over financial reporting -- including the financial work that passes through IT. It also requires the company's auditors attest to the quality of the company's internal control over financial reporting in the auditor's annual report. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) itself has recognized the challenges for smaller companies: smaller companies typically don't have full-time financial controllers; managers in smaller companies have a broad span of control, and this could lead to management override of financial controls; and smaller companies are more dynamic and don't have well-documented processes. Your company may have a lot of work to do to produce a report that makes investors feel confident about your numbers -- even if you are the most honest company. Labels: Champy, sec, small business
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Sunday, April 29, 2007
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Thursday, April 19, 2007 When the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act was passed by Congress and signed into law in 2002, its goal was to protect investors through increased disclosure and stiffened internal controls. The law was passed following accounting frauds at Enron, WorldCom and other U.S. companies. But on April 4, 2007, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced it will revisit some of SOX's rules. The primary focus will be the heavy financial costs of Section 404, which requires auditors of most publicly listed companies to verify the effectiveness of the company's internal controls and procedures for financial reporting.
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Tuesday, April 17, 2007 As CFOs tussle this proxy season with the complexities of the Securities and Exchange Commissions new disclosure rules for executive pay, Moody's Investors Service is coming out with a user's guide to help shareholders benefit from the disclosures. By calling for more information from companies, the SEC rules reveal "the way performance incentives influence management behavior and retention of top-level executive talent," said Mark Watson, managing director of the rating service's Corporate Governance Group and a co-author guide. "We believe compensation is a determinant of management behavior that indirectly affects credit quality." User's Guide to SEC Pay Disclosure Rules Labels: Executive Compensation, Moody's, sec
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Monday, April 16, 2007 The chief accounting guru at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Hewitt stands at the center of burning policy debates — from how far to cut back on corporate reforms imposed after the Enron debacle to which executives are to be punished for manipulating their companies' numbers. Hewitt, 70, came to the job in August in the twilight of a long career as a California banking regulator and a partner at Ernst & Young, one of the nation's four largest accounting firms. SEC's key accounting guru working to streamline rules Labels: chief accountant, Hewitt, sarbanes oxley, sec, streamline
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Thursday, April 05, 2007 The Securities and Exchange Commission is sending its accounting staff to work with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board on additional revisions to the auditing standard that has been criticized by public companies and legislators for creating costly audits of internal controls. At a Wednesday SEC hearing, staff members of the Office of the Chief Accountant asked the commissioners for permission to work with the PCAOB to address several concerns that were raised during the current public comment period on the revised Auditing Standard No. 2 — which both regulators loosely refer to as AS5. Saying the staff will be "fine-tuning" AS5, the commissioners voted unanimously on all the staffers' requests.
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Wednesday, March 28, 2007 The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two former Enron lawyers for their role in the sale of a Brazilian power project to one of the company's infamous partnerships. The SEC alleged that Jordan H. Mintz, former vice president and general counsel of Enron's global finance group, and Rex R. Rogers, former vice president and associate general counsel, of making material misrepresentations and omitting material disclosures from the company's public filings. According to the commission, the misconduct concerned Enron's 1999 sale of an interest in a troubled power project in Cuiaba, Brazil, to a related party called LJM Cayman (a.k.a. LJM1), controlled by then-chief financial officer Andrew Fastow. SEC Charges Two for Enron's Brazil Deal Labels: criminal charges, enron, lawyers, partnership, sec
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Saturday, March 24, 2007 Labels: foreign filer, registration, sec
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