2009 Big Four Annual Report Now Available
Our 2009 Big Four Annual Report is now available for immediate purchase and download. More information at www.amesrgi.com/products_annualreport.asp
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July 1, 20092009 Big Four Annual Report Now AvailableOur 2009 Big Four Annual Report is now available for immediate purchase and download. More information at www.amesrgi.com/products_annualreport.asp June 9, 2009Mark Olsen Resigns as PCAOB ChairMark Olsen, chair of the PCAOB since June 2006, announced his resignation effective then end of July. Sphere: Related Content June 8, 2009NCSU Study Finds Flaws in XBRL FilingsA study conducted by two accounting professors at North Carolina State University on the SEC’s pilot XBRL program found significant flaws in the data. The study examined filings submitted by 22 companies during the SEC’s voluntary program, and raises concerns about data quality ahead of the mandatory XBRL filing deadline for the largest 500 companies, beginning with quarter-ending June 15, 2009. Sphere: Related Content June 2, 2009Security Auditor Is Sued in Credit-Card Data BreachSavvis, a “IT infrastructure services” provider, is being sued after issuing a clean security audit to CardSystems Solutions in 2004, three months before CardSystems was hacked and compromised. Wired’s Threat Level blog calls this the first such suit against a security auditing firm. Sphere: Related Content May 20, 2009More Audit Fees ListsWe wrap up the March to April proxy statement busy season with three more lists of audit fees, as a follow-up to our earlier post. We again look at largest increases and decreases from FY2007 to FY2008, and we’ve added a third list of the 10 largest total audit fees. These 30 companies were taken from about 2400 proxies filed during March and April, 2009. The average increase in this group was about 10.0%. PricewaterhouseCoopers clients had an average increase of 8.9%. The three of the four largest audit fees-paid in FY2008 belong to PwC clients: JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs Group and Bank of America. With the large acquisitions made by each of these three companies in the second half of 2008, one might expect that audit fees increases ought to be even larger in FY2009. Net, audit fees increased for this group of PwC clients by about $6.5 million. Sphere: Related ContentMay 18, 2009WolframAlpha and Financial DataWolframAlpha is a new search engine—”computational knowledge engine: it generates output by doing computations from its own internal knowledge base”—from Wolfram Research,. which debuted over the weekend. The Internet is alive with discussion of WolframAlpha being a Wikipedia killer and an alternative to Google. April 15, 2009Institutional Investor Magazine Ranks Investor Relations DepartmentsInstitutional Investor Magazine has released a study ranking investor relations departments based on surveying buy-side and sell-side portfolio managers and analysts. While the online article doesn’t provide the exact questionnaire used, it appears that they essentially asked these analysts which companies were forthcoming and helpful in their investor relations functions. Winners are divided by category and sector. For example, in the Financial Institutions category, Large-Cap Banks sector, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America go 1-2-3 among buy-side analysts. Sphere: Related ContentApril 8, 2009Auditor Market Share Lists: Audit Fees Increase/DecreaseTwo more lists have been added to our Auditor Market Share Lists. These lists provide the 10 companies with the largest increases and decreases in total audit fees, among proxy filers in March 2009. These 20 companies were taken from more than 1000 proxies filed during March. The average increase in this group was about 6.1%. KPMG clients, for one, have an average increase of 10.9%. Boise Inc., a KPMG client, had the largest increase in fees at more than 1500% between FY2007 and FY2008, although McGladrey was Boise’s auditor for FY07. Furthermore, as Hoovers.com notes, Boise Inc. “was formed in 2008 when Aldabra 2 Acquisition Corp. purchased the paper and packaging assets of Boise Cascade.” Synovus Financial was the KPMG client with the largest decrease, -60%. Sphere: Related ContentApril 2, 2009New Century Trustee Files Suit Against KPMGKPMG is being sued for “no less than $1 billion in compensatory and consequential damages” by the bankruptcy trustee for New Century Financial.
Francine McKenna, of Re: The Auditors fame, is quoted in the story, saying that if the suit is successful, “it may embolden others to look more closely at the possibility of bringing [accounting] firms to some level of culpability for the things that happened” that led to the credit crisis. KPMG spokesman Dan Ginsburg said, “KPMG acted in accordance with professional standards in New Century, and we will vigorously defend our audit work. Any implication that the collapse of New Century was related to accounting issues ignores the reality of the global credit crisis. This was a business failure not an accounting issue.” New Century disclosed a total of $10.4 million in fees between fiscal 2002 and 2005.
March 30, 2009OpenID Now Supported for CommentersOpenID, a login framework “eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites,” is now supported on amesrgi.com for commenters. OpenID allows users to login with a GMail, Yahoo, Wordpress.com, or Blogger account, among others. Sphere: Related Content |
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