Category: Financial Reporting Council
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Risk Management — Of Golf Games and Priority Setting
1 comment on Risk Management — Of Golf Games and Priority SettingThis has been a good month to be traveling outside the United States. The travails of…
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If the Large Accounting Firms Stood Up for Themselves — What Might they Say?
I was chided last week by a senior partner at one of the large accounting firms,…
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Can Another Audit Firm Collapse? Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence
Sitting out these balmy summer evenings, I have a clear look at my neighbor’s corroded and…
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Wisdom on Catastrophic Risks — Benoit Mandelbrot, “The Misbehavior of Markets”
A recurring theme at the American Accounting Association convention last week, on the challenged condition of…
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The Accounting Professors Ask: Are the Audit Firms Sustainable?
Spending a week in August at a convention of three thousand accounting professors would not be…
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Are the Audit Firms Sustainable? If There are no Answers, Change the Questions
To borrow from Oscar Wilde, only the truly hard-hearted could watch the US Treasury’s Advisory Committee…
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Why This Site?
The Threatened Collapse of the Last Large Accounting Firms and What that Means for the World…
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Audit Firm Survival — Is Government-Backed Insurance at the Cutting Edge?
Considering the vacuity of the debate on the survivability of the Big Four audit firms and…
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Catastrophe Bonds for Auditors — An Idea that Refuses to Stay Dead
Our teen-ager just finished a great school course, “Monsters In Literature.” The class read about all…
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Revising Auditor Liability — Europe Takes the Lead, by Baby Steps
In the otherwise sterile dialog on the survivability of the large audit firms, there were two…
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Risk Assessment and Priority Setting — When Word of Mouth is All the Recommendation You Need
Belated thanks for the interest and uptake on my post of June 20, on the dispiriting…
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Catastrophe for the Audit Firms … and the Talk Goes On, and On, and On ….
Did anyone really think that the endless chatter about saving the system of privately-provided audits for…
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Federal Charters for Accounting Firms — A Blank Page Approach
Six years on from the disintegration of the Arthur Andersen firm, the fragility of the last…
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Ernst & Young Consolidates — And History Asks: Who Cares?
This one comes straight from the heart. First, I salute the plan announced in early May…
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The Future of Auditors as Gate-Keepers — A Glossary of The Non-Solutions
Do investors get real value from their gate-keepers? It was a main question at a conference…
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Insurance to Save the Auditors — Yet Another Non-Starter
This column was originally published in the IHT on August 27, 2005. With other related work…
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Accounting Standards Convergence — Sometimes the Bear Eats You
For months now the trans-Atlantic regulators have kept up a complex choreography, hoping to converge the…
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Risks and Choices — Managing the Odds in an Uncertain World
A while ago I set out with my editor at the IHT to broaden out beyond…
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What the Wine Sellers Buy — A Metaphor for Understanding Subprime
The credit crunch spreads – from tapped-out holders of adjustable-rate mortgages, to specialty insurers desperate to…
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Independent Auditors’ Reports — If They’re Obsolete, What’s the Alternative?
On March 27 I posted an earlier column from the IHT — here — which suggested…
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BDO International and the Bankest Case – Another Nail in the Structure of the International Accounting Firms
When I first wrote last summer about the adverse jury verdict inflicted on the Seidman accounting…
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To Save a Collapsing Audit Firm? Leadership Replacement is a Non-Starter
On the troubled state of the large audit firms, it has perhaps been wrong of me…
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Auditor Independence — If There’s No Value, What’s the Point?
The latest example of finger-pointing in the credit market turmoil is the examiner’s report placing blame…
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Société Générale’s 2007 Annual Report – Jérôme Kerviel Is So Last Year
The recurring claim of French exceptionalism got a big boost early this month – at a…
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The Accountancy Regulators — Motion Is Not Progress
My last post, critical of the proposal from the SEC’s Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting…
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Accounting and Audit Judgments — Please, No More Standards!
A new one-liner in the cultural vocabulary was introduced when the hit comedy, “No Sex Please,…
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Ethics in Corporate Leadership — Teachable or Not?
Last week it was my pleasure — and challenge — to be a guest speaker in…
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Societe Generale — Of Internal Controls and Risk Management
Published in the IHT on February 1, 2008 (here) SocGen: When Risk Management Fell Asleep at…
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Book Report: Tim Harford — The Logic of Life
The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World By Tim Harford Random House,…
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Auditor Concentration, Choice and Competition — the GAO Takes a Pass
In the logging camps north of my little home village, lumberjacks teaming up on a two-man…
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Can the Accounting Regulators Picture a Future Without the Big Four?
Saying the Unthinkable Published in the IHT on November 10, 2007 There’s a deep-seated and superstitious…
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Big Four or Mid-Size — Can the Regulators Save the Accounting Firms?
Can Midsize Auditors be Turned into Big Ones? Published in the International Herald Tribune on October…
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The Big Four’s Litigation Cost: A Matter of Survival
What litigation cost would kill a Big Four accounting firm? Since this column first appeared, the…
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Auditor’s Report as Guaranty — Is There Any Real Value There?
What value is delivered to investors and other users of financial information, in exchange for the…
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Outside Investors: No Fix for the Large Accounting Firms
What Money Can’t Fix Originally published in the International Herald Tribune on April 6, 2007 Billy…
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The Accountants’ Own Search to Establish Real Value
Accountants and Auditors: Time to Part Company? Originally published in the International Herald Tribune on November…
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The Survival of Seidman and BDO after Bankest
In the weeks since this column of August 18, Seidman and BDO have been keeping a…