VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow is quoted in an article about the decreasing number of earnings reports that are audited and the pressure on auditors to make the final results consistent with the unaudited numbers. “Earnings reports have become less and less reliable, and investors are understandably increasingly skeptical. The next step should be increasing…
Tag: accounting
SOX Internal Controls Provision Creates Investor Value After All
[I]n the longstanding controversy over 404(b), the voice of one constituency has been conspicuous by its absence — and ironically, it’s the very group the regulation supposedly protects: namely the investment community. Whether the provision actually holds value to investors has remained unclear.Now, the January issue of the The Accounting Review, an American Accounting Association journal, includes the…
Exxon Must Face Class-Action Suit Over Climate-Change Accounting – Bloomberg
Bloomberg reports: Exxon Mobil Corp. must face a lawsuit by investors who blamed a drop in the company’s shares on the disclosure that regulators were scrutinizing its reserve accounting related to climate change. U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade on Tuesday denied Exxon’s bid to dismiss the suit. Kinkeade wrote that the Greater Pennsylvania Carpenters Pension…
PwC doing double duty as auditor and tax lobbyist – MarketWatch
VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow is quoted in this article about potential conflicts of interest in PwC’s getting lobbying fees from audit clients. Nell Minow, a corporate governance expert and the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, told MarketWatch, “There are serious conflict of interest issues when an auditor has a lucrative side project involving its…
Comment Letter on IOSCO Consultation Report on Audit Committee Good Practices from Samantha Ross
Mr. Jonathan Bravo International Organization of Securities Commissions Calle Oquendo 12 28006 Madrid Spain By email: consultation-04-2018@iosco.org Re: Public Comment on IOSCO Consultation Report on Good Practices for Audit Committees in Supporting Audit Quality To the Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions: Thank you for the opportunity to comment on your…
Corporate auditing is broken. Here’s how to fix it – CapX
Can any auditor be truly independent if it is selected by the management it is supposed to review without conflicts? The corporation’s shareholders – key users of the audit report – nominally have the authority to choose auditors. But this authority is usually exercised upon the recommendation of the corporation’s board of directors, which customarily…
Why Shareholders Should Be Cautious of These KPMG Audits, Despite SEC Assurances
SEC Chair Jay Clayton basically told investors “nothing to see here” when five KPMG partners were indicted for unlawfully using prior knowledge of confidential information from their regulator, the PCAOB. Francine McKenna quoted VEA Vice Chair Nell Minow in an article for Marketwatch: Corporate governance expert Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, said…
In Stunning Rebuke, GE Shareholders Show Auditor Ratification Is Not Always A Routine Matter – Corporate/Commercial Law – United States
On April 25, shareholders of General Electric Company (GE) approved KPMG LLP as the company’s auditor for another year, but only by a margin of 65 percent “for” to 35 percent “against.” According to data from consulting firm Audit Analytics as reported by The Wall Street Journal, this represents “one of the highest levels of…
Non-GAAP Measures: Questions and Insights
Cindy Fornelli of the Center on Audit Quality writes about perspectives from a series of roundtables with audit committee members, management, investors, securities lawyers, and public company auditors on non-GAAP reporting: If GAAP is the bedrock, why do companies present non-GAAP measures? Participants were asked to share their views on what drives the presentation…
Are Auditors Reliable?
A new report from the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators shows that global accounting watchdogs identified serious problems at 40 per cent of the audits they inspected last year involving companies in “riskier” situations, such as M&A deals. These included conflicts that compromised objectivity, and widespread failures to test the accuracy and reasonableness of…
