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ANR: SEC Wants Chinese Audit Workpapers; The Big 4 in Court Is a Rare Sighting; How NOT to Lose Weight at Your Desk Job | 06.20.12

SEC seeks Big 4 audit papers from China: source [Reuters]
The Chinese arms of all of the Big Four audit firms have been asked by U.S. regulators to turn over documents related to audits of China-based companies listed in the United States, a person familiar with the matter said on Tuesday. The formal requests made by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ratchet up the tension in a standoff between U.S. authorities, the companies and Chinese officials over access to the auditors' work papers. Concerns are now growing that if no diplomatic solution is found, Chinese companies could be forced to de-list from American stock exchanges.

Big Four Auditors and Jury Trials: Not In The U.S. [re:The Auditors]
Based on what has happened in other, international cases – Centro in Australia, Nortel in Canada – the auditors in the U.S. are saving themselves from embarrassment.
 
E&Y Baltic Employee Loses Auditor License Over Snoras [Bloomberg]

Lithuanian authorities canceled an auditors license for an Ernst & Young Baltic UAB employee and told the company to improve controls after reviewing his financial reports on Bankas Snoras AB issued before the lender’s bankruptcy. The bank’s auditor, Ramunas Bartasius, lacked “skepticism” and failed to gather sufficient evidence to mitigate auditing risks to “acceptable low levels,” said the Authority of Audit and Accounting in Vilnius in a statement on its website today. Ernst & Young Baltic must improve auditing controls by Dec. 15, it said.

This Embarrasses You and I* [WSJ]
When Caren Berg told colleagues at a recent staff meeting, "There's new people you should meet," her boss Don Silver broke in, says Ms. Berg, a senior vice president at a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., marketing and crisis-communications company. "I cringe every time I hear" people misuse "is" for "are," Mr. Silver says. The company's chief operations officer, Mr. Silver also hammers interns to stop peppering sentences with "like." For years, he imposed a 25-cent fine on new hires for each offense. "I am losing the battle," he says. Managers are fighting an epidemic of grammar gaffes in the workplace. Many of them attribute slipping skills to the informality of email, texting and Twitter where slang and shortcuts are common. Such looseness with language can create bad impressions with clients, ruin marketing materials and cause communications errors, many managers say. There's no easy fix. Some bosses and co-workers step in to correct mistakes, while others consult business-grammar guides for help. In a survey conducted earlier this year, about 45% of 430 employers said they were increasing employee-training programs to improve employees' grammar and other skills, according to the Society for Human Resource Management and AARP.

 
The Robin Hood Tax [TaxProf]
Celebrities endorse it!
 
Weight Loss Tips That Keep Fat People Fat [ATL]
This translates from BigLaw to Big 4 quite easily.
 
Paul Krugman: Prepare For Alien Invasion — And Spend Our Way To Economic Recovery [HP]

"If you actually look at what took us out of the Great Depression," the Princeton University professor said in an interview with Chris Hayes of MSNBC. "It was Europe's entry into World War II and the U.S. buildup that began in advance." "So if we could get something that could cause the government to say, ‘Oh, never mind those budget things; let’s just spend and do a bunch of stuff.' So my fake threat from space aliens is the other route,” Krugman said before a laughing crowd. “I’ve been proposing that.”