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Accounting News Roundup: Inversion Is All the Rage; Buffett Says BofA Accounting Error Is NBD; EY Settles with CalPERS Over Lehman | 05.05.14

Tax Break ‘Blarney’: U.S. Companies Beat the System With Irish Addresses [Bloomberg]
Inversion is all the rage: "Pfizer is the biggest company yet to follow a growing trend. At least 15 publicly traded U.S. companies have taken steps to reincorporate abroad in the past two years. Most of their CEOs didn’t leave. Just the tax bills did."

Former President Bush honored with Kennedy award [WaPo]
For breaking the "No new taxes" pledge: "Former President George H.W. Bush was honored Sunday with a Kennedy 'courage' award for agreeing to raise taxes to confront a spiraling deficit, jeopardizing his presidency that ended after just one term."

BofA’s Accounting Blunder Brings No Bother to Buffett [Bloomberg]
WB says it's NBD: "That error they made does not bother me," Buffett said. "You do the best you can."

Ernst & Young Settles With CalPERS Over Lehman Audit [Law360 (Subscription)]
CalPERS had $700 million in Lehman Brothers bonds when the investment bank went down for the count in 2008.

Republicans put padlock on tax reform [The Hill]
The Highway Trust Fund is running short on money and Ways & Means members don't want anyone getting bright ideas: "We want to maintain the integrity of the draft and our approach to tax reform. The last thing I want to do is see things get piecemeal," said Rep. Charles Boustany (R-LA). “I don’t think anybody on the committee wants to start tearing our draft apart and using it for pay-fors."

Portions of conflict minerals rule stayed by SEC [JofA]
There's nothing quite like like picking apart legislation through litigation: "Companies will not have to explicitly declare whether their products contain minerals that originated in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo or its neighboring countries, according to the SEC. The SEC issued an order Friday staying the effective date for compliance with portions of its conflict minerals rule that requires statements that an appeals court ruled last month would violate the First Amendment."

Rappers, Ranked By Vocabulary-Size [io9]
With a chart! Impressive.

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