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Friday Footnotes: EY’s Deep and Cozy Trouble; KPMG Avoids Audit Trial; GT’s New Digs | 7.23.21

EY Accused of Actively Concealing NMC Health Audit Fraud From Investors [Bloomberg] Ernst & Young faces accusations it “actively concealed” a six-year fraud from investors in a fresh lawsuit over its auditing work for the troubled NMC Health. The hospital operator’s founder, Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty, said the accounting giant enjoyed a “deep and cozy” relationship with executives at the troubled firm, alleging that the auditors turned a blind eye to thousands of suspicious transactions. Shetty is seeking $7 billion from the lawsuit.

Pennsylvania CPA Association Names First Female CEO [CPA Practice Advisor] The Pennsylvania Institute of Certified Public Accountants (PICPA) Board of Directors has unanimously selected Jennifer L. Cryder as its CEO and executive director. The selection marks the first time in PICPA’s 125-year history that a woman is at the helm of the statewide accounting association. Cryder is only the sixth executive to serve in the role since the PICPA was founded in 1897.

Productivity hasn’t suffered much due to work from home, says Deloitte India’s Anandorup Ghose [The Economic Times] “The big change, if you ask me, is not about work-from-home or from office, it’s the fundamental acceptance that it is okay to have people work-from-home from time to time. But, if you ask any organisation, the intent is eventually to get people back into office, to get collaboration restarted which is essentially the whole point of having an office to begin with.”

KPMG Preempts China Forestry Audit Trial, Settling Out of Court [Bloomberg Tax] KPMG LLP has settled with the liquidators of a collapsed Chinese timber company as it was about to face trial for allegedly shoddy auditing.

Grant Thornton launches center of excellence in Orlando [Consulting.us] Grant Thornton’s Orlando COE will initially enhance the firm’s national indirect tax practice, focusing on sales/use and property tax compliance and consulting services. The team will use a data-informed approach that leverages analytics, automation, and visualization.

U.S. SEC chair says agency to restart swaps regulation effort [Reuters] The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to embark on a renewed effort to write “long overdue” rules for the registration and regulation of security-based swap execution facilities, Chair Gary Gensler said on Wednesday.

IRS launches ‘Tax Pro Account’ feature [Journal of Accountancy] The IRS unveiled a new online feature on Monday known as the “Tax Pro Account,” the purpose of which, for now, is to automate the submission of powers of attorney (POAs) to authorize tax practitioners to represent individual taxpayers and tax information authorizations (TIAs) to view those taxpayers’ accounts.

Many A/R teams behind the curve on modernization [CFO Daily News] Some A/R departments may think they’re in a better place with digitization than they are in actuality. That’s the word from Billtrust’s new report, The State of Accounts Receivable: The Journey to Modernize. The report found 86% of the A/R pros surveyed view their department as somewhat or very modernized. And they used words like “innovative” and “efficient” when talking about their systems and processes. But other statistics featured in the report reveal that this may be more of a hopeful perception than reality.