Sino-Forest Announces Resignation of Auditor [SF]
Sino-Forest Corporation ("Sino-Forest" or the "Company") announced today that Ernst & Young LLP ("E&Y") has notified the Company that it has resigned as the Company's auditor effective April 4, 2012. In its resignation letter to the Company, E&Y noted that the Company had not prepared December 31, 2011 consolidated financial statements for audit and that, in the Company's March 30, 2012 filing under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, Sino-Forest said that it remained unable to satisfactorily address outstanding issues in relation to its 2011 annual financial statements.
MF Global U.K. Staff Seek $62 Million in Bonus, Severance [Bloomberg]
Employees of MF Global Holdings Ltd (MF) (MF).’s U.K. unit are seeking 39 million pounds ($62 million) of unpaid bonuses, severance pay and pension contributions from the collapsed broker’s administrator KPMG LLP. The service company that employed staff in London has one of the largest claims on a list of creditors published by KPMG on March 14. The 39 million pounds is for the unit to meet its remaining contractual obligations to workers, including guaranteed bonuses and statutory redundancy pay, KPMG administrator Richard Heis said.
O.C. man accused of embezzling $16 million [OCR]
The former financial officer for an Irvine tech company has been accused of embezzling more than $16 million and then losing most of it to gambling or the financial markets. Joseph Ibrahim, 33 and formerly of Rancho Santa Margarita, was arrested in New York late last month. A federal management ordered him back to Orange County earlier this week to be arraigned on a federal wire-fraud charge.
A question: "[W]hy is it that many seem to expect accounting concepts, no matter how difficult or complex, to be understood by means of a single sentence? People rarely have such expectations for other professional and scientific fields."
In a comment letter, the AICPA wrote that the framework will be a valuable resource for practitioners. But the AICPA also described concerns, some of which are similar to those mentioned in the comment letter of the Center for Audit Quality (CAQ), which is affiliated with the AICPA. One concern focuses on how an organization should consider the “ranges of acceptability” that the updated framework describes for principles that are present and functioning.