All PCAOB articles – Page 23
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Blog
PCAOB Routs Nevada Firm Where Beckstead Landed
The PCAOB has thrown the book at a small Nevada audit firm for a long list of audit violations, including a suspension for Brad Beckstead, former partner with Beckstead and Watts. Beckstead challenged audit inspections and the existence of the PCAOB before the U.S. Supreme Court, which has created uncertainty ...
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Blog
PCAOB Reorganizes Auditing Standards by Topic
The PCAOB is reorganizing its audit standards, integrating standards the board wrote with historical standards it adopted on an interim basis under Sarbanes-Oxley. “The standards will be organized by topics that generally follow the flow of the audit process, making their use easier and more efficient for auditors,” said PCAOB ...
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Blog
Study Finds Blind Spot in Audit Quality Reviews
New research suggests audit reviewers may sometimes give audit teams the benefit of the doubt when reviewing a team’s work. The study found reviewers who had no knowledge of any ill feelings on the part of the audit manager reached judgments consistent with the audit evidence. Those who were aware ...
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Blog
Aguilar: SEC Must Extend Its Global Reach
SEC Commissioner Luis Aguilar, an outspoken proponent of stronger agency oversight, says the regulator must do more to extend its global reach. In a recent speech, Aguilar framed the SEC’s imperative simply: “As companies increasingly have foreign operations, the SEC will need to address how best to extend its supervisory ...
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Article
Audit Voices Try to Calm Tensions on Evidence
Image: Leaders of the auditing world are calling for a truce in arguments between internal and external auditors over how much evidence external auditors should collect themselves while scrutinizing internal controls—and are calling on audit committees to intervene earlier to prevent such disputes. “Essential value will be lost if external ...
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Blog
Deloitte Advances Ucuzoglu to Lead Audit Practice
Image: After Deloitte advanced its head of audit to CEO in February, the firm has appointed Joseph Ucuzoglu chairman and CEO of subsidiary Deloitte & Touche. Ucuzoglu says he has a handful of near-term priorities that focus on innovating the audit practice to elevate audit quality. “We want to really ...
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Blog
Franzel Reveals Progress in Internal Control Audits
Image: PCAOB member Jeanette Franzel said to expect improvements in the audit of internal control once 2014 audit inspections are published. “Preliminary results of the 2014 inspections indicate that some improvements have been seen in the area of auditing internal control,” Franzel said at the recent IIA annual conference. “That ...
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Blog
PCAOB Wraps 2013 Reports With Grant Thornton
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has published a tough report on Grant Thornton, finding problems in 20 of 36 audits inspected, a failure rate of 55 percent. Inspectors said the deficiencies were significant enough to conclude auditors did not obtain sufficient audit evidence before arriving at their conclusions. Details ...
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Blog
Globally, Audit Inspectors Find Big Problems
U.S. audit regulators are not the only ones alarmed by high rates of busted audits. Around the globe, audit regulators who are members of the International Forum of Independent Audit Regulators compared notes and found nearly half of the audits they inspected in 2014 contained deficiencies that suggest the audit ...
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Blog
Shareholder Wins Bid to Amend Audit Committee Rules
A recent letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission denies Citigroup’s proposal to bar a person with a history of bankruptcy from joining the audit committee. The Commission said it disagrees with Citi that a shareholder proposal to pursue a bylaw amendment on audit committee service should be excluded from ...
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Article
Dueling Thresholds Emerge on Going-Concern Warnings
Image: A new accounting standard meant to give investors more warning of when a company is in trouble could actually lead to less warning of trouble. Audit and accounting professionals are struggling over conflicting interpretations of “substantial doubt,” and the answer is not easy. “I’m not sure if the standard ...
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Blog
SEC Approves PCAOB Budget, Wants Improvements
Image: The SEC has approved a 2015 budget of $250.9 million for the PCAOB, 3 percent less than its 2014 budget but 8 percent more than the board actually spent in 2014. PCAOB Chairman James Doty said that the decrease “reflects an appropriate reassessment of assumptions relating to personnel and ...
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Article
More Hints on Audit Report 2.0
New international requirements for an expanded audit report are providing a teaser for what the United States should expect in coming years. The new international standard is modeled on an earlier U.K. version, and it’s similar to a proposal expected from the PCAOB this year. The details differ, but the ...
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Blog
Study Says Investors Need to Know About Audit Offshoring
Apparently doubting the quality of the audit, investors punish companies when they first learn that others from outside the principal audit firm had a hand in assuring the company’s financial statements.
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Article
Recognize the Big Standards’ Changes
The auditing and financial reporting world will spend lots of 2015 preparing for the new revenue recognition standard going into effect by 2017—but from leasing to going concern warnings to IFRS adoption in the United States, plenty of other major changes may arrive as well. “Folks have come to see ...
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Blog
PCAOB Disciplines Grant Thornton Auditor in Japan
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has disciplined a Grant Thornton auditor in Japan for failing to address numerous red flags that revenue could be overstated in the 2010 audit of Baldwin-Japan Ltd.
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Blog
PCAOB’s Chief Inspector Provides Checklist for Year-End Audits
Dec. 16—The audit profession’s chief inspector has provided auditors with a year-end checklist, giving companies some fair warning about what they can expect auditors to be focused on in their upcoming audit cycles. The most common deficiencies found in 2014 inspections still relate to audits of internal control, said Helen ...
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Blog
Audits Failures Linked to Execution, Not Process Problems
Image: Dec. 10—Audits fail not so often because the audit firm’s process was flawed, but because individual auditors or engagement teams fail to adhere to firm methodologies, according to Jay Hanson, a member of the PCAOB. At a national accounting conference on regulatory issues, Hanson said he sees much more ...
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Blog
SEC, PCAOB Deliver Fresh Warnings on Auditor Independence
Dec. 9—Public companies have been handed a not-so-subtle reminder to pay closer attention to auditor independence. At the annual AICPA conference this week, the SEC announced it had sanctioned eight audit firms with fines totaling $140,000 for violating auditor independence rules because they prepared financial statements of brokerage firms whose ...
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Blog
PCAOB Finds No Big Improvement in 2014 Inspections
Image: The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board will soon offer a peek at 2014 inspection findings, but you won’t see much improvement, said Chairman James Doty. The board has delivered consistently tough marks to the major audit firms in recent years, calling for better audit work on such items as ...