Category: News

Stupid Man Frustrated with Girlfriend Engages in Random Act of Accounting Firm Violence

Are you a jobless loser? Is your significant other driving you batty? Not sure how to vent your frustrations? One man found himself in such a predicament an acted in the best way he knew how:

An unemployed man who smashed the window of a Burton accountancy firm during a heated row with his girlfriend has been ordered to pay £750 compensation.


Luckily, Craig’s Guy moment of rage resulted in some poetic justice for Mom and Pop accounting firms everywhere:

The 28-year-old, of Balfour Street, Horninglow, was left with a ‘substantial injury’ to his wrist after he punched and shattered the 10ft by 5ft window on Monday evening. Emma Thompson, prosecuting, told magistrates: “It was 6pm when two witnesses saw the defendant put his fist through the window. Police were called and they traced him 45 minutes later in Evershed Way. He was found to be bleeding heavily. “He made full and frank admissions straight away and said he’d had a heated row with his partner,” Ms Thompson said. “He told officers he punched the nearest thing to him and he accepts it was a stupid thing to do.

[via Burton Mail]

Aronson, LLC Spent $100,000 to Give iPads to All of Its Employees

[caption id="attachment_52044" align="alignright" width="260" caption="Excitement is relative."][/caption]

Has your firm shown you any appreciation lately? Made you feel loved? Did you have a single reason to be thankful for anything last Thursday? For some, the answer is a resounding “Hell no.”

This is not the case at Rockville, Maryland-based Aronson, LLC who shocked the pants off all of their 200+ employees with iPads at their annual meeting.

Why would a firm would do this, you ask? Is management trying to a prevent a winter exodus? Was it a banner year for the firm and they opted to spread the wealth around? Maybe. But right now they’re going with “appreciation” and a anniversary:

Aronson LLC, the Mid-Atlantic region’s premier public accounting and consulting firm, surprised its staff at its November Annual Meeting by handing out over 200 iPads, one for each and every Aronson employee. The company’s offering, valued at nearly $100,000, was made both to celebrate the firm’s 50th Anniversary (coming in 2012), and to demonstrate appreciation for the employees’ dedication and hard work.

Motives notwithstanding, it beats kick in the shins. All non-Aronson employees may commence envious bitching as they see fit.

[via Aronson]

Costa Rican Auditor Admits To Never Actually Auditing

Provident Capital Indemnity Ltd’s former outside auditor admitted in federal court this week to participating in a $670 million fraud in the life settlement bond market, according to the Department of Justice.


56-year-old Jorge Castillo pleaded guilty Monday to one count of conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud, U.S. Attorney Neil MacBride in Alexandria, Virginia, said in a call with reporters. He could face up to 20 years in prison.

Castillo admitted to conspiring with PCI president Minor Vargas Calvo to prepare false financial statements that reflected contracts PCI held with other reinsurance companies. Castillo admitted to prosecutors that he never audited PCI’s financial statements and that he was aware PCI did not actually enter into the contracts with other reinsurance companies listed on the company’s financials. PCI paid him about $84,000 from 2004 to 2010.

Castillo will be sentenced in a Richmond, VA federal court on May 22.

DOJ: Purported Auditor Of Provident Capital Pleads Guilty In Scheme [WSJ]

Focus Media Management: Muddy Waters Has It All Wrong, Should Be Sued For Being a Rumor Monger

Focus Media Chief Financial Officer Kit Low disputed Muddy Waters’ claims on a conference call Tuesday with analysts, saying that the firm’s report misinterpreted LCD-display numbers and financial data. He said Muddy Waters concentrated largely on Focus Media’s mergers and acquisitions, but the company hasn’t made any “major acquisitions in the past three years” because it is putting more emphasis on its core business. Focus Media Chief Executive Jason Jiang criticized short-sellers in a message posted on his verified account on China’s Sina Weibo microblog service. “Why isn’t anyone suing these short sellers who are just spreading malicious rumors everywhere?” the message said. “These people should be punished according to the law!!!” [WSJ]

Jobs You Wish You Had: The New Orleans Court Accountant Who Made $661,000 Last Year

That’s not a typo, people, this guy made $661,000 in 2010 for services rendered to the New Orleans traffic court.


Vandale Thomas, a personal friend of Judge Robert Jones, billed the traffic court over $660,000 in 2010 for entire chunks of hours with zero description of what those hours entail. “There’s just aggregations of hours. Forty-five hours for this, 45 hours for that. And that’s it. On that basis, we paid, the courts paid $661,000 to this guy. We’ll be talking to people to try to make sure where the money went and what it was for,” New Orleans inspector general Ed Quatrevaux told local WWLTV.

On top of his billable hours, Thomas also was handed $100,000 from traffic court with no mention of what the fee was for in court records.

Well, let’s do the math (keeping in mind while we do it that I am anything but a mathlete). If Thomas billed $40 per hour (pulling that number out of my ass, much like Thomas likely pulled his hours), he’d have to work a little over 317 hours a week to validate a $660,000 salary for the year. The problem with that, of course, is that there are only 168 hours in a week. According to documents obtained by WWLTV, Thomas is billing $80 an hour, therefore by that math, he’d have to work 20 hour days every single day of the week for every week of the year to earn the $661,000 he billed.

Judge Jones, when confronted with the dollar amount of Thomas’ services, expressed shock, telling WWLTV he then called in Thomas and told him “unless you have an army of accountants working for you around the clock, this is humanly impossible.” Jones went on to say he supports an investigation of Thomas, but doesn’t think it will show any criminal wrongdoing.

I know armies of accountants and they don’t make that kind of money.

New MACPA White Paper Outlines Future CPA Leaders’ Vision For the Industry

Our favorite revolutionaries over at the Maryland Association of CPAs never take a vacation, and for those of you interested in leadership, you might be interested in their latest project. Or at least enjoy the following without making snide comments about overachievers that mask your true feelings of jealousy. Let’s face it, you’re probably not as cool as Tom Hood. It’s fine, just embrace it.


A team of graduates from MACPA’s 2011 Leadership Academy say CPAs must become more global-minded, proactive, future-focused, balanced and tech-savvy to maintain their competitive edge in a complex and constantly-changing world. Getting there, they say, will require a brand new set of skills and characteristics. Among them: Unity and flexibility, the ability to collaborate and crowdsource, a mind shift from history to possibility, and a new tech-focused mindset.

It is likely no coincidence that Gen Yers, as the future leaders of the industry, are hyper-connected, collaborative and far more interested in the “possible” than the “already been done.”

Forty members of the MACPA’s 2011 Leadership Academy used those infamous collaboration skills to shape a new MACPA white paper, “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: Maryland’s Young CPAs Create a Vision of the Profession’s Future.”

“These young CPAs care deeply about their profession,” said MACPA Executive Director Tom Hood, CPA. “They know we’re facing an increasingly complex and challenging future, and they see each challenge as an opportunity not only to help clients and employers, but to position CPAs as the world’s most trusted business advisor.”

The white paper comes on the heels of the profession’s CPA Horizons 2025 project, which leveraged input from CPAs, regulators, thought leaders and futurists to identify key trends and map what the profession will look like in 2025.

The interesting part about the MACPA’s project is that opinions and visions are a dime a dozen in this industry, but Leadership Academy participants went beyond postulating about the future to map opportunities from a future CPA leader’s point of view complete with action plans, timelines and desired results. This isn’t simply a report on the state of the industry at some point in the future but a report on how young leaders can get us there in the here and now.

“There have been a lot of questions swirling about the next generation of business leaders. Topping the list is, ‘Are they ready to lead?’” said Hood. “Our Leadership Academy provides the answer: Not only are they ready to lead, they’re hungry to lead, and this white paper is their starting point.”

Download the white paper here. To find out more about the Leadership Academy, head here.

FAF Chairman Isn’t Interested in the FASB Taking a Backseat in Accounting Rulemaking

In a November 15 letter to the SEC, FAF chairman John J. Brennan wrote that reducing FASB’s role in setting U.S. financial reporting standards “may weaken the positive leverage that U.S. GAAP and U.S. standard setting have provided to improving accounting standards for investors in the world’s most robust and transparent capital markets.” The FAF also disputed the SEC staff’s proposed goal of achieving one set of global accounting standards. Instead, the organization feels that “a more practical goal for the foreseeable future is to achieve highly comparable (but not necessarily identical) financial reporting standards among the most developed capital markets that are based on a common set of international standards.” [CFO]

Lloyd Blankfein Would Like Everyone to Get with Program Re: Mark-to-Market Accounting

This means you, Steve Schwarzman. And you, writers of FASB hate mail. It’s about time you all got on board.

“We are not moving away from mark-to-market accounting,” Mr. Blankfein said Tuesday. “The more we work with it and live with it the more I wish that everybody else would act in a corresponding way.”

You have your orders.

Goldman to Maintain Accounting Method [WSJ]

Accountant’s Neighbors Disgusted with His Overgrown Bush

It would probably surprise no one that landscaping is hobby that many accountants are fond of. Or maybe it would. Whatever. The meticulousness of making sense of numbers seems to jive well with a finely manicured lawn, trees and bushes that adorn one’s property. Plus, the green thumb matches the eyeshade.

Anyway, putting all that time and energy into natural aesthetics could cause anyone to get a little possessive. If anyone so much as lays a finger on a single tree branch without permission, things could get ugly. To wit:

An accountant who allegedly left a former policeman bleeding and concussed in a brawl over hedge trimming before launching an expensive law suit has defended his response insisting: “It wasn’t just trimmed it was butchered”.

Now if that sounds like a bit of an overreaction, the accountant in question – Anthony Branson – claims that this incident was part of ‘extreme intimidation’ by his neighbors, the Marreros. Intimidation that was ultimately brought to a head:

The next day Mr Marrero, who had been away, sent family to attempt to finish off clipping the hedge, something Mr Branson said further antagonised the situation. He also claims he discovered the gates of the adjoining paddock, where he and his wife Corrinne keep around a dozen alpacas, left open, apparently deliberately.

Trimming a man’s bush without permission could be understandable. But dragging innocent, sometimes overly hairy, camelids into the situation? That just seems uncalled for.

Hedge brawl accountant: ‘It wasn’t just trimmed it was butchered’ [Telegraph]

Former Swinging Salzberg Soldier Sentenced to 11 Months in Prison For Insider Trading

Former Salzberg Soldier and San Francisco housewife Annabel McClellan – who we know as the wife of former Deloitte tax partner Arnold McClellan – was sentenced in federal court yesterday to 11 months in prison for lying to a regulatory agency about slipping insider trading tips to her sister and brother-in-law. McClellan pleaded guilty in April to one count of obstructing and due administration of the law after she made false statements to SEC investigators in 2009.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup handed down the sentence. In her plea, McClellan admitted to eavesdropping on hubby’s conversations about corporate transactions and lying under oath to SEC investigators. Prosecutors guesstimate that McClellan’s naughty behavior defrauded British investors of about $3.05 million.

We are unclear at this time if Annabel will resume her business ventures – like the My Nookie app – upon her release from prison. She should certainly have some experience sistering up with strangers by that point, which can only help her swinger aspirations, unless her soon-to-be prison girlfriend insists on monogamy.

San Francisco housewife sentenced for obstructing insider trading probe [SJ Mercury News]

Will Yelp Give Goldman Sachs and Citigroup 5 Stars For Its IPO?

Fun fact: yours truly used to be a hardcore Yelper, ranked San Francisco’s funniest Yelper for a good year and a half before I gave up and quit the site. God that makes me feel like a loser. As it should.

Anyway, here’s my issue with a Yelp IPO… Yelp should have quit way back when I did. The window of opportunity, in my mind, has long passed. Maybe in 2007 Yelp had a chance to blow it up but how are they even relevant anymore? Beyond the rabid fan base and drive-by Googlers, I’d say no. They blew a Google deal. They totally bit off the foursquare formula when they should have come up with it first. They still don’t have a money-making plan, as far as we can tell.

So here’s the really crazy part: according to DealBook, Yelp has brought on Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to help with its IPO. Did Jeremy S. suffer from brain-eating food poisoning?!

The offering, which is expected to value the company at $1.5 billion to $2 billion, will probably come to market in the first quarter of next year, a person close to the company said. Yelp is expected to file its prospectus by the end of this year.

In recent months, Yelp has openly telegraphed its intention to go public. At a technology conference during the summer, Yelp’s chief executive, Jeremy Stoppelman, said the company was still pursuing an I.P.O. but did not have a set time line. In late July, in a move that many interpreted as another step toward the public markets, the company hired a chief financial officer, Rob Krolik, who helped Shopping.com go public in 2004.

Just last year, Stoppelman said Yelp likely wouldn’t go public for years, while it took $25 million in funding from Bono’s Elevation Partners. Remember, Elevation Partners also bought a 25% stake in Palm – anyone remember them? Anyway, earlier this year, Stoppleman proudly declined additional financing and announced that “an IPO is back on the table” for Yelp.

Fun fact: GS and Citi also worked on Groupon’s IPO, with Goldman serving as one of the lead underwriters.

But Yelp is no Groupon (that might be a good thing). The seven-year-old start-up has yet to prove how it can make money, outside of shaking down companies and forcing them into sponsorships. Oops, did I say that out loud? I meant through “advertising” revenue from sponsoring companies interesting in “creatively shuffling” their negative reviews.

The sad part is Yelp has an extensive team of writers in its users, and they are constantly creating free content (some of them are not too shabby, either) yet it still cannot figure out how to make money off that. What on Earth is an IPO going to change about that?

How One Emotionless CPA Completely Dominated The Penn State Press Conference

U.S. Steel CEO and vice chairman of the Penn State Board of Trustees John Surma spent last night in the hot seat, fielding angry questions from bitter Penn State fans-cum-journalists (read: second year J-schoolers) distraught by this whole scandal nonsense. You see, it fell on his shoulders to announce to the world that the trustees canned head coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier.

Why do we care? Surma got his BS in accounting from Penn State University in 1976 and started off his career at then Price Waterhouse. He is a member of the AICPA and sits on the Bank of New York Mellon’s board. Therefore, he’s a member of the club.

And he handled last night’s Penn State press conference like a gangster. Even when angry “journalists” attacked.

See? This is why you send a CPA into the lion’s den. An architect would have crumbled. An engineer may have cried. A doctor would have cowered in fear. But a CPA? Stone-faced and calm with zero emotion, just how a Board of Trustees vice chairman should be when announcing a beloved coach has been canned due to, er, questionable discretion. And of course, because CPAs aren’t real big on that whole interaction thing, they called Paterno on the phone to tell him the news. Not a sit down or even coffee, but a phone call.

Told you he was gangsta.

Here’s the video: