Accounting News Roundup: Ernst & Young’s Maneuver in Lehman Suit; Most Execs Not Ready for Accounting Changes; Confirmed: Little People Pay Taxes| 02.24.11

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu quits Swiss system to make UK its new legal home [The Guardian]
“With zero fanfare, Britain has gained a multinational. The global accountancouche Tohmatsu has quietly shifted its legal registration from Switzerland to London, flying in the face of threats by other City firms to flee the Square Mile.

The firm, which has 169,000 staff around the world and is vying with PricewaterhouseCoopers for the title of the world’s biggest professional services group, is thought to have moved because of legal controversy surrounding its previous status as an obscure Swiss entity known as a verein – a membership structure originally intended for sports clubs, voluntary organisations and unions.

The change – which became effective over the summer but was not announced publicly by Deloitte – has little tax implication for the Treasury because Deloitte’s decentralised structure means taxes are paid by its member firms on a country-by-country basis. But it amounts to a vote of confidence in English corporate law over Switzerland’s regime.”

H.P. Settles Lawsuit Against Hurd [NYT]
“A fierce and public feud between Oracle and Hewlett-Packard, two of the world’s largest technology companies, has ended after all of two weeks.

On Monday, the companies announced a settlement to a dispute that centered on Oracle’s hiring of Mark V. Hurd, the former chief executive of H.P., as a president. H.P. sued Mr. Hurd this month, claiming he would violate agreements to protect H.P.’s secrets by taking on such a high-level role at Oracle. The parties declined to reveal details about the settlement but said Mr. Hurd would protect H.P.’s confidential information.

However, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, H.P. said it had modified its separation agreement with Mr. Hurd. He effectively waived about half the compensation owed him. Mr. Hurd agreed to give up his rights to the 330,177 performance-based restricted stock units granted to him on Jan. 17, 2008, and to the 15,853 time-based restricted stock units granted on Dec. 11, 2009.”

FinancialForce gets jiggy with iPad [AccMan]
FinancialForce snags Life Champions from Sage with the lure of the iPad: “Field agents will be equipped with iPads and will record new opportunities directly in Salesforce CRM. Credit card payments can be processed on the spot and transactions seamlessly created in FinancialForce Accounting.”

Tax Preparer Who Threatened Prosecutor Is Sentenced to 3 to 6 Years [New York Law Journal]
“A tax preparer who sent threatening letters to a Manhattan assistant district attorney who had twice prosecuted him was sentenced Friday to three to six years behind bars.

Prosecutors arrested Jack Chang, 55, last summer after Gilda Mariani, the chief of the money laundering and tax crime unit in the district attorney’s office, received two ominous letters. One was addressed to her husband at her home and contained a white powder that turned out to be cornstarch. The other was delivered through interoffice mail.

Both depicted a tombstone with Mariani’s name and contained virtually the same message: ‘I finally got my 9 mil gun and I am insane, you are responsible for my insanity and I will make sure that you get at least one for each and every year I spent incarcerated.’ “

Caron: The Costs of Estate Tax Dithering [TaxProf Blog]
“President Obama was widely criticized for ‘dithering’ over the decision of whether to add more troops in the Afghanistan War. Yet Presidents and Congresses over the past decade escaped similar opprobrium for ‘dithering’ in the face of the long-scheduled one-year repeal of the estate tax beginning January 1, 2010, to be followed by the reinstatement of the tax on January 1, 2011. Although the “smart money” agreed after the passage of the Bush tax cuts in 2001 that the Administration and Congress would never allow the repeal-reinstatement scenario to play out, that is precisely where we now find ourselves.”

Hiring of town accountant upsets group [Seacoastonline]
They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it any more.

Pay package increases for Koss CEO [Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel]
“Michael Koss, the top executive at Koss Corp., received a 41.6% boost in his pay package last year, the same fiscal year that an embezzlement of about $34 million was discovered at the company, new documents filed with regulators disclosed.”