Don’t understand LinkedIn? Know you oughta’ join the party but don’t know how to get started?
Having a presence in LinkedIn should be standard for all accountants. It is approaching the level of a business card in terms of basic tools every business person should have.
Prof. David Albrecht has a great introduction on his blog: LinkedIn for Accounting and Business Students.
Don’t let the title of his article lead you astray. …
CPAs whose licenses end between 34 and 66 received a reminder this week from the CBA that those lucky CPAs need to report by 7-1-12 whether they need to have a peer review.
All CPAs with licenses in that range number have to tell the board whether or not they are required to have a peer review. In one sentence, any firm providing attestation services must have a peer review. What’s the big dea? One of the biggest impacts is this new requirement includes sole practitioners who are not members of the AICPA.
My license is in that range. So I received my letter this week. …
Have a post up at my other blog, Nonprofit Update, about a fun analysis by Don Boudreaux looking at the comparative purchasing power of a non-supervisory employee working at average wages now compared to 1975.
I can’t think of a better time to be alive. Or, is the middle class better off today than in 1975?
He looks at items from a 1975 Sear catalogue and uses the average pay rate to convert the prices to the number of hours a person needs to work to buy the item. Then he compares to the number of hours to buy a reasonably comparable item today.
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Purchasing power of an average worker in 1975 compared to nowRead More »
Perhaps it is because I’m attentive to the issue, but it seems doubts are spreading about the wisdom of adopting IFRS.
Rueters had this story: Analysis: Doubts emerge over U.S. move to global accounting
Key thread in this article: there isn’t, and won’t be, a uniform standard for all countries.
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Your peer review will cover A&A engagements.
The work that will be included in your peer review is accounting and auditing engagements, referred to as A&A. This obviously includes all your audits under SAS. It also includes your compilation and review services under SSARS.
Not so obvious is your services under the SSAE rules. This would be all those odd projects like examinations or compilations of prospective financial statements or written assertions, and other agreed-upon procedures.
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IASB and FASB announced they will release another exposure draft on the major changes to lease accounting. The volume of revisions they plan to make to the original exposure draft are significant enough that they want to another round of discussion. There announced timeframe is to finish their deliberations in the third quarter of 2011 with another exposure draft shortly after that.
Don’t expect a change in the basic concept that all leases are going to be brought onto the balance sheet. The news release makes that quite clear:
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The number of going concern opinions for public companies declined in 2010. Here is some good info for those of us outside the SEC world to learn what is going on beyond our field of vision.
Here is the recent trend, according to the article Going Concern Opinions Trail Off in 2010, at Compliance week, which is quoting a report from Audit Analytics:
How significant is that trend? Not that big of a change.
Since the above data is for public companies, I wanted to put it into perspective. I wondered how many public companies are listed. Found one webpage that quotes a number of 17,000 from many sources. The Audit Analytics home page says there are over 20,000. Let’s go with the 20,000 estimate.
So the change from year to year is rather small in relation to 20,000 public companies:
From 2003, which is the low of the last decade, to the high of 2008 is an increase of 776, which is 3.9% of public companies. From the peak of 2008 through 2010 is a decline of 453 going concern opinions.
Last step I took in looking at the trend is to calculate the number of going concern opinions as a percent of publicly traded companies (20,000 as mentioned above and assuming no change in the number of public companies):
An improvement? Yes. A major change? I don’t think so.
What’s new in this picture for me? I’m surprised how many going concern opinions there are for public companies, how small the change was from 2003 to 2008, and how small the improvement has been in the last two years.
(Hat tip: first, Going Concern and then, CPA Letter Daily)
So the auditor goes to the new client’s bank and gets copies of the bank statements from them. An entire year’s worth of statements. Does all the audit work. Everything looks fine. Issues their report. Everything is fine, right?
Except that in addition to the client cooking the books, the local bank made up those bank statements. Fraud came tumbling down because the auditor, yes notice the auditor tumbled to the fraud, went to the bank’s home office to get copies of the bank statements, which were drastically different from what the local branch provided.
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So what’s an auditor to do if the local bank is in on a massive fraud?Read More »
Here are a few things to consider.
Cost. That’s a biggie. Remember to consider the direct costs for the review, any travel time, and hotel & airfare if the firm is beyond driving distance. Cost is not the only factor though.
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New cartoon is available at Once Upon Internal Control.
Good procedures protect against false accusations – feature cartoon #2 from Once Upon Internal Control illustrates another way that good procedures can protect your staff. Cartoon runs about 8 1/2 minutes.
The first feature cartoon is here.
(cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)
Previous post introduced the ideas of Cliffs, Cul-de-sacs, and Dips explained by Seth Godin in his book, The Dip.
What do we do with that idea?
Seth Godin says:
It’s okay to quit, sometimes.
In fact, it’s okay to quit often.
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When is it time to let go of a project? The Dip, by Seth GodinRead More »
IFRS hasn’t achieved consistency in financial reporting in countries where it has been implemented, even amongst firms in the same industry.
Consistency between countries is low because:
IFRS has been filled with carve-outs, special deals, exceptions, and time-freezes; in short, countries are adopting their own national brands of IFRS
In addition, principles-based accounting hasn’t cleared up the off-balance-sheet financing issue where IFRS has been adopted.
These are some of the secondary criticisms that Professors Anthony Catanach and Edward Ketz raise in their post, IFRS is for Criminals.
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Another critique of IFRS – it requires honest judgmentRead More »
In a long post in advance of the roundtable held this week by the SEC on IRFS, Professor Tom Selling gives lots of inside-baseball info on the roundtable. See the post No News from the SEC on its IFRS Roundtable is Bad News
Later in the article he raises some superb questions he would like to see asked, but doubts will be discussed. Some examples:
Why are we doing this?
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A few troublesome questions that haven’t been asked about IFRSRead More »
(cross-posted from my other blog, Nonprofit Update.)
When is it time to push through the obstacles and keep trying to achieve?
That is the topic of Seth Godin’s book, The Dip. Since the book was written in 2007, I am late to the party. Still want to write about it because most people I talk to are not familiar with his work.
We need to distinguish between cliffs, cul-de-sacs, and dips.
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What are Cliffs, Cul-de-sacs, and Dips? The Dip, by Seth GodinRead More »
The California Society of CPAs has a place on their website for peer review which includes a directory of CPA firms that could provide your peer review.
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