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Accounting News Roundup: PwC’s Settlement and EY Recruiting | 08.29.16

PwC's settlement

On Friday we learned that PwC had had enough fun fighting the lawsuit brought by the Taylor, Bean & Whitaker bankruptcy trustee, settling the case for an undisclosed amount. We speculated that perhaps PwC finally decided that the risk of losing the case was far too great to keep going, however, some people don't think so: 

Mike Young, a trial lawyer at Willkie Farr & Gallagher who has defended accounting firms, cautioned against reading too much into PwC’s decision to settle the case. “Cases settle when the parties decide they want to be done with it,” said Mr. Young, who isn’t involved in the Taylor Bean litigation. “You can’t assume anything by the mere fact that a case has settled.”

I confess to having no working knowledge of litigation matters, but there has to be reason why the sides are ready to settle, right? Even if it's because they're bored. "Wow, civil cases are nothing like what you see on Law & Order. Whaddaya say we wrap this up?"

So what was the reason? It's not every day that you get sued for $5.5 billion. And it's certainly not every day that you decide to take that $5.5 billion case to trial, in front of a jury against a guy with a track record of winning cases. Assuming that PwC wanted to mitigate their exposure seems to make sense.

EY (!) recruiting

It's almost fall so the Big 4 recruiting blitz will be on in full force before you know it. EY is out of the gate early, making mention of the 10,000 US hires it made on campus for their last fiscal year and they're expecting to wrangle a similar number for fiscal year 2017. Maybe that explains all the cheering?

In any case, it sounds like the firms' needs are changing a bit according to its director of campus recruiting:

[Natasha Stough] said that EY is seeing an increase in its needs for the tax practice, with the transactions/M&A group seeing some growth as well. While its assurance and advisory practices have grown significantly over the past few years, she projects that to level off considerably from past double-digit-percentage increases, although the firm is still hiring for both of those practices.

So if you're in school and want to give yourself better odds at landing a gig with EY, I suggest you start liking your tax classes.

Has Donald Trump released his tax returns?

Nope! But Y combinator president Sam Altman says the IRS should drop its audit of Trump so he can't use that excuse any more. If the Service ended its audit and Trump still refused to disclose his returns then, Altman tweeted, "it'd be reasonable to assume he's hiding something."

Elsewhere in California, two prominent CPAs, Fiona Ma, Chairwoman for the Board of Equalization and Hilary Crosby, California Democratic Party Controller hosted a "CPAs for Sunshine" press conference yesterday:

"CPAs are speaking out about sunshine because it makes our democracy stronger," [Ma] said in a statement. "It's critical to uncover Trump's potential conflicts of interest and whether he would use the office to make himself richer or to help Americans."

Also, there's a website with a countup (?) clock since Trump last made his returns public. It's promoting the hashtag: #ShowerOrAGrower and, at this point, nothing really surprises me anymore.

Previously, on Going Concern…

The aforementioned TBW/PwC settlement. And in Open Items, someone who accepted a full-time offer in IT risk assurance is having second thoughts.

In other news:

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