Category: News

Ohio Mistakenly Notified a Woman That She Was Due a $200 Million Tax Refund

Ohio, like many states, is in a bit of a budget pickle and perhaps this level of vigilance is part of the reason.

Denise Bossetti received a notice in the mail that indicated she was due $200 million but was skeptical (even with the letterhead).

Apparently 9,700 Ohioans received notices of inflated refunds and the Ohio Department of Taxation claims this is a new one and that “The problem has been fixed.” Probably a good idea.

Woman gets $200 million tax-return notice — but it was mistake [Sandusky Register via AT]

Here’s How This Year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Would Shake Out If It Were Based on Accounting Research Production

It’s that time of year again where thousands of Americans spend countless hours of company time researching basketball teams and agonizing over which #12 seed will pull a minor upset only to have someone from marketing, who doesn’t know a damn thing about basketball, to win the pool. It also marks the time of year when the accounting faculty at BYU puts outs their own simulated version of the tournament, played out based on the productivity of accounting researchers over the last six years.


As you can see, a lot of similar schools are making a run again this year including Texas (last year’s simulated champion) and Michigan State. If you’re interested in what this year’s non-bracketed accounting rankings are, you can check them out on the campanion research page.

Games start on Thursday tomorrow (obviously I’m not in a pool) so if you’re having trouble filling out your bracket, this seems like a good place to start. You could do a helluva lot worse when it comes to strategy.

Accounting News Roundup: Will E&Y Take the Brunt of Lehman’s Bankruptcy?; Texting Japan Donations; Richard Hatch’s Light Sentence | 03.14.11

Japan Battles Nuclear Meltdown as Millions Without Power, Water [Bloomberg]
Workers battled to prevent a nuclear meltdown after a second blast rocked an atomic plant north of Tokyo, as helicopters and convoys of army trucks headed toward areas worst-hit by Japan’s strongest earthquake. No large release of radiation was detected after the explosion, which didn’t breach Fukushima power station’s No. 3 reactor and followed a build-up of hydrogen gas, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano told reporters in Tokyo today. The risk of a large leak is very small, he said.

BOJ Takes Action to Bolster Moneya href=”http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704893604576199261875222164.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLETopStories”>WSJ]
The Bank of Japan jumped into action Monday to temper the economic blow from the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency that hit northern Japan, doubling the size of its asset-purchase program and pouring a record 15 trillion yen ($183.17 billion) into money markets to ease liquidity concerns. “What we were most concerned about was the possibility that increases in anxiety and risk-aversion moves would negatively affect the real economy, so we judged it appropriate to mainly boost purchases of risk assets,” BOJ Gov. Masaaki Shirakawa said after the bank’s policy board meeting, which was cut to one day from two because of the crisis.

Lehman Auditor May Bear The Brunt [WSJ]
Federal investigators have grown increasingly doubtful they can prove Lehman executives violated the law by using an accounting maneuver known as Repo 105, which obscured the amount of risk Lehman held, making the firm’s finances look better than they were, The Wall Street Journal has reported. But Ernst & Young, Lehman’s auditor, is fighting fraud charges filed in December by the New York attorney general for, among other things, allegedly failing to adequately follow up on a whistleblower’s claim that Lehman was misstating the value and size of its assets.

Texting Japan earthquake donations [DMWT]
$10 will be added to your next phone bill for contributions to the following charities: American Red Cross, Salvation Army, Convoy of Hope, GlobalGiving and World Relief.

Big 4 Bias – Can We Ever Overcome It? [BDO/CEO Insights]
BDO Global CEO Jeremy Newman wants some respect!


Nine Months is Not a ‘Severe Punishment’ Fitting Survivor Winner Hatch [Yahoo]
Hatch famously failed to pay the taxes due on the $1 million prize won from the first season of “Survivor” more than 10 years ago. He was convicted of tax evasion and subsequently served more than three years in prison. He also, obviously, was ordered to refile amended tax returns that accurately reflect his 2000 and 2001 income and pay the income taxes due. Though any reasonable person disinterested in spending any more time in federal prison would have immediately filed corrected tax returns and pay the taxes due, Hatch failed to do so, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, he has been sentenced to prison for an additional nine months. Hatch was released from prison in 2009, and since then has been serving a three year term of supervised release.

India’s IFRS Carve-Outs and the Pipedream of Global Accounting Standards [The Accounting Onion]
If IFRS adoption was ever a goal worth pursuing, it has long since vanished, and the political motivations of its remaining supporters are now deprived of any pretense of legitimacy. It’s time to let the rest of the world “countdown to IFRS” if they want to, but If the SEC were really serious about protecting investors, it would scrap the IFRS roadmap. In it’s place, there should be a new plan for making U.S. GAAP unquestionably the pre-eminent financial reporting system in the world.

AIG Adopts Poison Pill to Preserve $65 Billion NOL [TaxProf Blog]
AIG, like GM and Citigroup before it, has adopted a poison pill to preserve its $65 billion NOL by ensuring that no investor acquires a 5% stake and triggers the change of ownership rules.

LECG Fire Sale Continues; San Fran Forensic Accounting Group Joins FTI Consulting

After last week’s news of LECG Corp. selling off pieces of itself to FTI Consulting, Grant Thornton and WeiserMazars, today the company announced that it has also sold its forensic accounting practice in San Francisco to FTI:

Professional services firm LECG Corporation (NASDAQ: XPRT) announced today that it has transitioned its San Francisco forensic accounting practice to FTI Consulting, Inc. The transition involves approximately 25 employees.


Not only that but the pieces left are also up for bid for anyone interested, although common shareholders shouldn’t expect to see anything:

With the advice of its restructuring advisors, LECG continues to negotiate the transition of all practice groups remaining after today’s transaction and transactions disclosed in previous public communications. LECG will use the proceeds from all practice group transitions to repay the $27.8 million in principal outstanding under its credit facility. The company will use the balance of any proceeds to make payments to other creditors. Contractually, if there is any remaining value available to equity holders, it would be first allocated to the company’s outstanding preferred stock. The company believes that the transitions and these transactions will not result in any proceeds for the common shareholders.

The Philly Business Journal reports that the company still has about 500 employees left but at the rate things are going, they’ll be elsewhere by St. Patrick’s Day. Good luck to everyone affected.

LECG Transitions Parts of Forensic Accounting Practice Group to FTI [LECG]
LECG jettisons another practice group, this time in San Francisco [PBJ]
Earlier:
WeiserMazars Moves into Chicago as Part of Acquisition of LECG Units [GC]

Accountant, Who Avoids Confrontation ‘as a General Rule,’ Guilty of Hitting a Trashman with Her Car

Question for the group: what could have been going on in this woman/accountant’s life that caused her to do the following?

An accountant drove into a bin man ‘in a rage’ after his lorry blocked the road, a court heard. Frances Henshaw, 43, was alleged to have snarled ‘like a rabid dog’ when she got stuck behind the wagon. She was hauled before the courts after bin man Craig Kelly claimed he was hit by her car as she forced her way through a tiny gap. Henshaw was found guilty of driving without due care and attention, leaving the scene of an accident and failing to report an accident.


We’ve come across a fair share of accountants that resemble a rabid dog (i.e. crazy eyes, violent biting, uncontrollable drooling) so that description is certainly believable but she does fall back on the passive nature of a many a beancounter:

She said: “They’d done a few clumps of bins and they’d made no effort to let me past. I felt there should have been an occasion where they acknowledged my presence. “I wasn’t shouting. I never shout at anyone. I avoid confrontation as a general rule. I would have stopped if I had hit someone. It’s just not something that’s in my nature to do, it’s incredulous to me.”

Raging accountant ‘drove her car into bin man who blocked the road’ [MEN]

Another Accountant Superhero Is in Our Midst

You may remember back in January when a PwC employee put down his pencil to – according to his farewell email – fight crime as the caped avenger. At the time, we expressed concern not only because there can’t be two Batmans but because…well, we’re just skeptical of any cube-dweller’s ability to make the streets safe for the rest of us.

Despite our doubts, that hasn’t stopped another accountant, Irene Thomas (aka Nyx), from taking to the streets to fight for truth, justice and all that crap.

By day Irene Thomas says she is a ‘boring’ accountant who lives in a cramped New Jersey flat. By night she puts on a black catsuit and mask with a red belt, gloves and boots, gets into her Honda Accord car and comes out the other side of the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan as ‘Nyx’. The 21-year-old is just one member of the Real Life Superhero Project, a group of humans who aim to bring a helping hand to people everywhere and thwart crime on city streets.

It doesn’t appear that Nyx wasn’t born with natural crime fighting abilities, as the Real Life Superhero Project has documented her training on their website. As with all superheroes, there has to be another side to Nyx that we don’t get to see. What kind of pain or personal aguish has she gone through that has caused her to take up this cause? Does the thought of spending hours upon hours in a cube farm staring at spreadsheets haunt her dreams to the point of insomnia, thus leading to the spending her nights running around the City a dominatrix outfit? Is she looking for more from life besides a good paycheck, generous benefits and half-days Fridays during the summer? Or is it something deeper?

‘Like the night, I cannot be proven or disproven to certain degrees – and also much like the night, when morning comes, there will be no trace of me.’

Jesus, who knows. Fly-by-night psychoanalysts are welcome to weigh in now.

Real Life Superheroes [via Daily Mail]

BREAKING: Some Banks Are Uncooperative with Auditor Requests

From the mailbag:

Just thought I’d share some developments from the audit world. Some financial institutions which respond to our audit requests are adding disclaimers such as the following:

“…The recipient acknowledges that [the respondent] does not represent and warrant that the information is complete and accurate. The recipient further acknowledges that the information may not disclose the entire relationship between the customer and [the respondent]…”

Basically, this is making the confirmation process entirely pointless as banks are saying that even if they sign and respond to a confirmation, they aren’t guaranteeing that their response actually means that the balance is accurate. They are also doing this in the fine print attached to a lot of confirmations so it wasn’t entirely obvious until some people started actually reading that fine print. This is causing issues as we can no longer rely on these confirmations for our audit procedures if they contain such a disclaimer.

(UPDATE, VIDEO) GW Accounting Professor Gives Qualified Opinion of Referee’s Services, Gets Ejected

Up until now, we’ve heard more about accounting professors losing their clothes (shirt, pants) than anything their tempers. But today, we learned about a prof who was expressing an expert opinion (perhaps a little too strongly) on the value of a service:

An accounting professor and high-profile supporter of the GW Athletics program was escorted from the Smith Center Saturday for verbally confronting a referee over a foul call. From his sideline seat on the court, Robert Kasmir yelled at the referee over a foul call on sophomore forward David Pellom, prompting his removal from the court by a member of the athletics department. “Basically, I told the ref he was the worst ref I’d ever seen and he wasn’t worth the $1,600 dollars they were paying him and that was it,” Kasmir said. “And then he ejected me from the game.”

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the fact that Mr Kasmir isn’t that bad of a guy:

Kasmir’s ejection came after he and his family were honored during the second half for their contributions to GW Athletics. Kasmir, who received his MBA from GW in 1974, has made at least one donation to the University ranging from $10,000 to $24,999, according to financial documents. Kasmir said the ejection would not keep him from making further donations to the University in the future.

But as for that referee, Kasmir has a very unqualified view, “I think the official should never be allowed to officiate another game in the Atlantic 10, in college basketball, in the United States.”

UPDATE: From the Post for those of you that like visuals:

Professor, donor tossed from basketball game [GW Hatchet via Deadspin]

Social Media Poses Enough of a Risk to Overstock.com That They Disclosed It in Their 10-K

It’s been quite some time since we picked up the Overstock beat but Gary Weiss picked up something in the company’s recently filed 10-K yesterday that makes us wonder if the company was shooting for irony or if they’ve given up on blaming the “shorts” turning instead to “social media,” which, similar to the anti-short campaign would allow them to encompass a number of villains without naming anyone directly.


From “Note 1A: Risk Factors” section of the company’s notes to the financial statements:

There has been a marked increase in use of social media platforms and similar devices, including weblogs (blogs), social media websites, and other forms of Internet-based communications which allow individuals access to a broad audience of consumers and other interested persons. Consumers value readily available information concerning retailers, manufacturers, and their goods and services and often act on such information without further investigation, authentication and without regard to its accuracy. The availability of information on social media platforms and devices is virtually immediate as is its impact. Social media platforms and devices immediately publish the content their subscribers and participants post, often without filters or checks on accuracy of the content posted. The opportunity for dissemination of information, including inaccurate information, is seemingly limitless and readily available. Information concerning the Company may be posted on such platforms and devices at any time. Information posted may be adverse to our interests, it may be inaccurate, and may harm our performance, prospects or business. The harm may be immediate without affording us an opportunity for redress or correction. Such platforms also could be used for dissemination of trade secret information, compromise of valuable company assets all of which could harm our business, prospects, financial condition and results of operations.

As Gary points out, this disclosure is especially rich since Patrick Byrne had a goon using Facebook to stalk critics like Gary, Sam Antar, Barry Ritholtz among others which of course was disseminated in various social media outlets. Newsflash to Overstock’s risk managers: when people are being pursued by creeps on the Internet, they complain about to EVERYONE THEY KNOW.

One could easily argue that Segway accidents at the office pose just as great of a risk to key employees – and thus a disclosable item – but perhaps that’s covered under their D&O policy? It still seems plausible that disclosure would still be warranted. Additionally, the risk of a good snowfall might cause some of Salt Lake City-based company’s employees to call in sick to enjoy the fresh pow could have resulted in a late filing which is certainly something the SEC would want to know. We know KPMG has a crack squad of auditors all over this engagement but it’s conceivable that they overlooked some other risks. If you’ve got ideas on what those might be, let us know below.

Which Accounting Firm Has a High-Ranking Partner Whose Hooker Habit Got Him in a Bit of Trouble?

Actually, there might be a few of them but we’re talking about a very specific instance. A partner with a hectic international travel schedule got taken to the cleaners by his wife after she discovered that he was keeping company on the side while on his business trips, including the aforementioned hookers. And as luck would have it, some of the court documents found their way into our inbox. We’ve clipped some of the juicy parts for you:


It should be noted that this particular situation took place a number of years ago and proceedings were still being wrapped up fairly recently. Now, the hookers angle is especially salacious (which we like) but what does a situation like this say about the pressure that many globetrotting partners are under? The firms demand a lot from their top leaders and a lifestyle of high pressure and international travel can wear on a person. If whores on the cheap happen to be in close proximity to your hotel…well, it’s not inconceivable that some partners may want to blow off some steam. Landing an exotic piece of tail to help you cope with the stress while traveling on business may be a lot of fun but if you have a wife and kids and home, that’s where things get can complicated, and in this case expensive, as the following indicates:

And we didn’t even mention the possibility of the spreading around the clap. No one wins there.

O Bank Restatements, Where Art Thou?

Because Jonathan Weil is wondering.

He noticed that Audit Analytics found that 699 SEC-registered companies filed restatements last year which was slightly higher than ’09. This was considerably less than the 1,566 restatements in ’06 but when it came to the number of banks that had restatements, he noticed something strange:

The figures for banks, in particular, look unnaturally low. Forty-four banks restated last year, one fewer than in 2009. Even more curious, there were 133 banks that issued corrections from 2008 through 2010. That was down from 169 banks during the previous three-year period, before the financial crisis took off in earnest, which makes no sense.

Here we had the greatest banking industry meltdown since the Great Depression. Hundreds of lenders failed. And yet the number of banks correcting accounting errors declined while the collapse was unfolding. There were no restatements by the likes of IndyMac, Washington Mutual or Lehman Brothers, for example. The obvious conclusion is the government has been giving lots of banks a free pass, as have their auditors.

Honesty for Banks Is Still Such a Lonely Word [Bloomberg]

Whoever Founded ‘National Employee Appreciation Day’ Probably Never Worked as an Accountant During Busy Season

That’s right team, March 4th marks National Employee Appreciation Day and if you happen to have a deadline today or just got Lumberged into working the weekend, you’re definitely not feeling appreciated.


Doubly ironic is the news from the latest list from Forbes that says that “Accounting” is the 6th Happiest Job in America. That is followed up by “Finance at #7 and “Legal” at #10. On the one hand, Forbes has these professions in the correct order – accountants are generally less miserable than those in finance or law but the fact that they appear in the top ten is laughable. Of course now that we have In a JIT, perhaps the happy ranking is slightly more believable.

Employee Appreciation Day 2011 [CBS]
In Pictures: The 10 Happiest Jobs In America [Forbes]