Acting Chief Accountant Stresses Auditor Independence and Audit Committee Oversight
On October 26, SEC Acting Chief Accountant Paul Munter issued a statement urging “all gatekeepers in the financial reporting ecosystem...
Slight Increases, Some Stagnation: CAQ and EY Report Cards on Audit Committee Transparency
On November 10, the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and research firm Audit Analytics released2021 Audit Committee Transparency Barometer,...
Restatements Decline for the Sixth Straight Year, Notching a New Twenty-Year Low
Audit Analytics (AA) has released its annual report on public company restatements, 2020 Financial Restatements: A Twenty-Year Review. ...
Adverse Management Assessments and Auditor Opinions on ICFR Effectiveness are Down
But Better Controls May Not Be the Reason Audit Analytics (AA) has published SOX 404 Disclosures: A Seventeen-Year Review, its annual...
Sustainability Reporting: (Almost) Everybody Does It
On November 16, the Governance & Accountability Institute (G&A) released 2021 Sustainability Reporting in Focus, its annual report on...
SEC Unveils its PCAOB Make-Over
On November 8, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced the appointment of four new members to the Public Company Accounting...
IFRS Foundation Announces the International Sustainability Standards Board
On November 3, at COP 26, the UN global climate summit in Glasgow, the IFRS Foundation, the parent of the International Accounting...
Deloitte Finds that Too Few Audit Committees are Climate Ready
Deloitte Global has released the results of a September 2021 survey of audit committee members to determine their readiness to response...
Delaware Issues a Warning on the Scope of Audit Committee Risk Oversight
On September 7, the Delaware Court of Chancery denied a motion to dismiss a shareholder derivative action alleging that the board of The...
SEC Revives a Proposal to Require Compensation Claw Backs After Restatements
The SEC has restarted rulemaking that would compel U.S. listed companies to adopt policies requiring recovery, on a no-fault basis, of...
More Researchers Find that CAEs Are Often Deployed to Meet Earnings Estimates
Yet another academic study highlights the potential abuse of changes in earnings estimates (CAEs).In Do Firms Time Changes in Accounting...
The Audit Committee’s Role in ESG Disclosure: Part II
What is the Audit Committee’s Role in ESG Disclosure, December 2020 Update, discussed a blog post in which Wes Bricker, PwC chair and...
EY Reports on the State of Cybersecurity Risk Disclosure
The EY Center for Board Matters has released How cybersecurity risk disclosures and oversight are evolving in 2021, its fourth annual...
Flying Blind? The Impact of Climate Change Disclosures on Financial Reporting
The Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) and Deloitte have each issued papers on the relationship between climate change and financial...
The SEC Turns Up the Heat on EPS and Other Accounting Abuses
On August 24, the SEC brought the third case in its long-running program to detect and prosecute quarterly earnings per share (EPS)...
PCAOB Staff Summary of 2020 Inspections: Fewer Findings, But Still Room for Improvement
The PCAOB staff has published its observations on the results of the Board’s 2020 inspections. See Spotlight: Staff Update and Preview...
Abuse of Audit Committee Auditor Selection Process Triggers an Independence Violation
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Ernst & Young (EY) and three of its former partners with violations of the auditor...
SEC Takes a Dim View of Sugar-Coating Cybersecurity Breaches
On August 16, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced an enforcement action against Pearson plc, a company that provides...
The S&P 500 Are (Almost) All in on ESG Disclosure
The Center for Audit Quality (CAQ) has published S&P 500 and ESG Reporting, a study of S&P 500 company environmental, social, and...