Author: Caleb Newquist

Legal cloud starting to lift for Fastow [HC]
[Andrew] Fastow is now working full-time for the law firm that represented him in civil matters over the last decade, Smyser Kaplan & Veselka, using his business background under the job title “document review clerk.” “We’ve found him to be very intelligent, creative and meticulous,” partner Lee Kaplan said. “We just gave him a raise, but he’s making far less than his talents are worth.”

Senator Questions Extension of Tax Cut [NYT]
[O]n “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Kyl, of Arizona, said: “The payroll tax holiday has not stimulated job creation. We don’t think that is a good way to do it.” Moreover, Mr. Kyl said, increasing taxes on the most affluent Americans, including small-business owners who report business income on their personal tax returns, would undermine the fragile economic recovery. “The best way to hurt economic growth is to impose more taxes on the people who do the hiring,” Mr. Kyl said. “As a result, the Republicans have said, ‘Don’t raise the existing tax rates on those who do the hiring.’ ”

Grover Norquist: a misleading accounting of recent history [Fact Checker/WaPo]
Grover’s appearance on Meet the Press yesterday garnered a ranking of Three Pinocchios. That’s out of a possible four (which is classified as a “whopper”).

KPMG sets dates for UK claims on MF Global cash [Reuters]
MF Global UK’s administrator KPMG said the failed futures broker’s clients will be able to claim monies frozen at the firm beginning early next month in a move that offers frustrated investors some hope they will recover their cash. KPMG said on Monday MF Global UK clients can formally make applications from Dec. 8 this year and asked that all claims are submitted by March 30, 2012.

Are Fourth Quarter Write-offs Looming for Deloitte’s Clients? [GOA]
The Grumpies have been busy. They’ve found 24 Deloitte audit clients who they say are at “at significant risk for some type of intangible asset write-down in the very near future.”

MF’s Missing Money Makes You Wonder About Goldman [Bloomberg]
Six months ago the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP said MF Global Holdings Ltd. and its units “maintained, in all material respects, effective internal control over financial reporting as of March 31, 2011.” A lot of people who relied on that opinion lost a ton of money. MF Global filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31. This week the trustee for the liquidation of its U.S. brokerage unit said as much as $1.2 billion of customer money is missing, maybe more. Those deposits should have been kept segregated from the company’s funds. By all indications, they weren’t. What’s the point of having auditors do reports like this? And are they worth the cost? It’s getting harder to answer those questions in a way the accounting profession would favor.

Ernst & Young on Auditor Rotation [The Summa]
FLASH: They’re not thrilled with the idea.

Appeal for EU to stick by accountancy reforms [FT]
The heads of several midsized audit networks have issued a last-ditch appeal to the European Commission not to dilute sweeping proposals aimed at reducing the dominance of the four biggest accountants and improving audit quality. In a joint interview with the Financial Times, the chief executives called on Michel Barnier, EU internal market commissioner, to hold his nerve as he finalises his recommendations for reforming the sector, which are expected next week.

KPMG’s Andrew Says ‘Significant Fraud’ Evident at Olympus [BBW]
KPMG International LLP’s global chairman, Michael Andrew, said fraud was evident at Olympus Corp. and his firm met all legal obligations to pass on information related to Olympus’s 2008 acquisition of Gyrus Group Ltd. before it was replaced as the camera maker’s auditor. “We were displaced as a result of doing our job,” Andrew told reporters at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong today. “It’s pretty evident to me there was very, very significant fraud and that a number of parties had been complicit.”

~ We’re calling it a half day, team. Have a Happy Thanksgiving and travel safe. We’ll be back to a full slate on Monday. And remember, if you’re eating at a partner’s house, use a fork to eat any potatoes.

Madoff Trustee Reaches $326 Million Settlement With IRS [Bloomberg]
Trustee Irving Picard found that Madoff or his company made payments to the IRS under a section of U.S. tax code that requires that 30 percent of dividend payments to non-resident aliens and foreign corporations be withheld for taxes, according to a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. A total of $330 million in payments were made on behalf of 145 foreign account holders and were reported to the IRS as federal income tax that was withheld from dividend payments. The agency erroneously paid refunds on claims related to the payment in the amount of $4.2 million, according to the filing.

Diamond Foods Says Director Death Unrelated to Payment Probe [Bloomberg]
Diamond Foods Inc. (DMND) said there’s no connection between the recent death of director Joseph Silveira and a board investigation of the company’s accounting. The San Francisco-based company’s shares tumbled 17 percent in late trading yesterday after CNBC reported that Silveira died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Diamond Foods, which makes Kettle potato chips and other snack foods, had posted a notice of his passing dated Nov. 17.

Tax refund loans land H&R Block in court again [KCS]
A lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles accuses the Kansas City-based tax preparation firm and others of targeting “minorities and the working poor” with products that “provide little to no value” while charging “predatory interest rates and fees.” Attorneys seek court approval to treat the case as a class-action claim that would cover California residents who had gotten a refund anticipation loan after Nov. 17, 2007 that included a refund account fee. The lawsuit similarly targets refund anticipation checks, which it claims are refund anticipation loans under California law, for a class-action claim.

Will the super committee’s failure revive Simpson-Bowles tax reform proposals? [DMWT]
Will the plan co-chaired by cranky pants Alan Simpson make a comeback?

Boehner: GOP willing to work with Obama on payroll tax [The Hill]
House Speaker John Boehner stressed Tuesday that House Republicans were willing to consider an extension of the current payroll tax cut. The Ohio Republican’s statement, which came the same day President Obama lobbied for the payroll tax cut in a New Hampshire speech, also called on the Senate to approve what he called more than 20 House-passed bills that could help create jobs. “With one single statement, the president of the United States could dislodge these bipartisan jobs bills and ensure they are brought to a vote,” Boehner said. “I hope the president will put country before party and call on the Senate to bring these bipartisan jobs bills to a vote immediately after Thanksgiving.”

MF Global Customers Missing $1.2 Billion Denied Committee [Bloomberg]
MF Global Inc. brokerage customers, who may be missing more than $1.2 billion from their accounts, won’t be allowed to form a committee to represent their interests in bankruptcy court, a judge ruled. Customer accounts believed to hold $5.45 billion were frozen Oct. 31, the day after the New York-based company reported a shortfall in funds that are required to be segregated under rules of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. A previous estimate of about $600 million in missing funds was raised to $1.2 billion yesterday by James Giddens, the trustee appointed to liquidate the company and distribute refunds to customers.

Supercom[m]ittee Failure Poses Threat to U.S. Recovery [Bloomberg]
The implosion of the congressional supercommittee is likely to delay any major deficit-reduction agreement until after the next presidential election and may pose an immediate threat to the struggling U.S. economy.The committee’s failure to reach a deal means several tax programs, including a payroll tax holiday, risk expiring at the beginning of next year, weighing on the household spending that accounts for about 70 percent of the world’s largest economy. The panel’s inability to agree on $1.2 trillion in budget cuts, w��������������������wn yesterday and Treasuries higher, also stoked doubts about U.S. lawmakers’ ability to overcome partisan gridlock and safeguard the nation’s fiscal health. “They could not agree even on the smaller challenge of $1.2 trillion,” said former White House budget director Alice Rivlin, among a coalition of officials who pushed the panel to “go big” and find $4 trillion in savings, in an e-mail. “I do not see a way to get to the big deal before the election, if then. It is really discouraging!”

Auditing Watchdog’s Audit of PwC, KPMG Find Weaknesses [WSJ]
The government’s auditing regulator found deficiencies in 28 audits conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and 12 audits by KPMG LLP in its annual inspections of the Big Four accounting firms. The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board said many of the deficiencies it found in its 2010 inspection reports of the two firms, released Monday, were significant enough that it appeared the firms didn’t obtain sufficient evidence to support their audit opinions.

At PWC, They Now Have Names [Economix/NYT]
The response from PWC this time breaks welcome new ground. It is signed by real people: Bob Moritz, the firm’s United States chairman, and Tim Ryan, the United States assurance leader. In the past, these letters — like audit reports signed by the firms — never mentioned a name. So it was impossible to even know if top management of the firm had approved the response. In this case, top management signed it.

Senator Gets Deloitte Information on Federal Audits [WSJ]
In a Nov. 7 letter to Deloitte LLP, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D., Mo.), who is chairwoman of a Senate subcommittee on oversight of government contracts, said she was requesting the information because the criticisms “raise serious questions regarding the integrity of all audits conducted by Deloitte.” She also said she wanted to better understand the impact on the federal government. The government spent more than $958 million on contracts with Deloitte LLP in 2010, she said in the letter. A Deloitte spokesman said the firm has “cooperated with the senator’s request.”

Taxman Preoccupies Wall Street to Upper East Side in IRS Levies [Bloomberg]
New York is where the 1 percent live — and they have the tax returns to prove it. Nine of the 10 most heavily taxed neighborhoods in the U.S. are in the city’s metropolitan area, Internal Revenue Service data show. The nine neighborhoods, which range from Manhattan to Fairfield County, Connecticut, accounted for 0.2 percent of all federal income-tax filers in 2008, the latest year for which data are available, according to IRS statistics compiled by Bloomberg. They paid 1.6 percent of all individual income taxes, eight times their proportionate share of the filing population.

MF Global HK can’t be sold as going concern-KPMG [Reuters]
KPMG, provisional liquidator of the Hong Kong unit of collapsed U.S. futures brokerage MF Global Holdings, said it was focused on returning client funds having failed to sell the business. Tuesday’s statement from KPMG came as the Australian arm of MF was shut down after failing to get an adequate offer and underscored the difficulty liquidators have had in selling MF’s Asian business, which generated around 14.4 percent of the company’s global revenue. MF Global, which filed for bankruptcy on Oct. 31 having placed disastrous bets on European sovereign debt, has laid off nearly half its staff globally, including more than 1,000 employees of the company’s broker-dealer unit.

Should j2 Global Communications Restate its 2010 Financial Reports? [WCF]
Sam Antar says, “maybe!”

Fired Olympus C.E.O. to Press Board on Fees [NYT]
“I am returning to the world headquarters of Olympus,” Mr. Woodford said by phone from London on Monday. “And I will use the opportunity to emphasize that all the facts come out.” He later told reporters at a London news conference that he was “not afraid of challenging my board members.”

Supporters Go Naked for Accused Tax Evader [Forbes]
Now that’s a support group.