ANR: House Panel Probes PCAOB; When a Tax Increase Isn't a Tax Increase; FAS 131 More or Less Does What It's Supposed to Do

U.S. House panel probes audit watchdog's economic analyses [Reuters]
A U.S. House panel is probing whether the country's primary audit watchdog is doing enough to weigh the economic impact as it considers new regulations for the nation's auditors. In a January 10 letter, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa and committee member Patrick McHenry told the chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, that they fear the board is "taking insufficient action to comply with the broad consensus that economic analysis is a critical element of credible regulatory policy." The Republican lawmakers added that internal PCAOB documents they had obtained appeared to show an "institutional resistance to rigorous economic analysis." They demanded that the PCAOB hand over other records by January 24 involving internal communications on economic analysis.

The Next Tax Increase [WSJ]

In case you missed it, President Obama held a press conference Monday to make essentially two points: He won't negotiate with Republicans over raising the federal debt limit, and if Republicans want any spending cuts at any time in the next four years they'll have to raise taxes along with it. He won, so get used to it, chumps. We'll elaborate on the debt-ceiling fight another day, but let's focus today on the President's demand to raise taxes—again. Millions of Americans, rich and middle class, are still recovering from the shock of the income and payroll tax hikes in their first 2013 paychecks, while ObamaCare's new taxes have also just kicked in. These are the biggest tax increases in at least 20 years, yet Mr. Obama is already stumping for another revenue raid.

Dear America: Your Higher Payroll Taxes Are Not The Result Of A Tax Increase [Tony Nitti/Forbes]

FYI.

Delving Into the Value Riddle [CFOJ (Subscription)]
As many companies kick off their annual audits this month, they are taking great pains to document how they arrive at the values they put on their books for hard-to-price assets like thinly traded securities, pension-fund assets and customer lists.

FAF Review Team Concludes FASB Statement 131 on Segment Reporting Generally Achieves Its Purpose [FAF]

So that's nice.

90% of passwords ‘vulnerable to hacking’ [Telegraph]

Global consultancy Deloitte claimed that over 90 per cent of user-generated passwords, even those considered strong by IT departments, will be vulnerable to hacking in 2013. Jolyon Barker, global lead for Deloitte's technology, media and telecommunications industry, said “Whilst moving to stronger, longer passwords means greater levels of security, people understandably find these harder to remember.”

Go drinking with past presidents at the Willard [GOG/WaPo]
I'm a Grover Cleveland man, myself.

Same Name Couple, Kelly Carl Hildebrandt And Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, Are Divorcing [HP]
After three years of marriage, famed same-name couple Kelly Carl Hildebrandt and Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt have filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. “She’s a Florida girl, and I’m a Texas guy,” the male Hildebrandt told NBC 6 on Friday. “We really did come from pretty different worlds.” The pair met on Facebook in May 2008 after the female Hildebrandt searched for anyone sharing her name. She came across one person — Kelly Carl Hildebrandt — and decided to send him a message. "I just told him that I saw we had the same name and I thought it was kinda cool and that I just wanted to say hi," she said on the Today Show in July 2009 (see full video below). "It was a sentence — the whole thing. It was only one sentence."