Police Clear Zuccotti Park of Protesters [NYT]
Hundreds of police officers early Tuesday cleared the park in Lower Manhattan that had been the nexus of the Occupy Wall Street movement, arresting dozens of people there after warning that the nearly two-month-old camp would be “cleared and restored” but that demonstrators who did not leave would face arrest.

Olympus accounting tricks queried back in 1990s [Reuters]
An investment banker raised concerns about dubious accounting at Japan’s disgraced Olympus Corp as long ago as the 1990s, after he discovered it was using Bermuda-based funds to “invent” assets and patch up its balance sheet, he told Reuters. The banker’s concerns, which he says were discussed inside Wall Street bank PaineWebber, his employer at the time and the arranger of Bermuda schemes for Olympus, is one of the earliest red flags known to have been raised over the Japanese company’s accounting irregularities, which continued for two more decades. “The Japanese accounting regiment at that time was very strange,” said the banker, explaining he had raised questions because Olympus was exploiting a loophole in accounting rules that mislead investors about its real financial health.

U.S.-listed China firms welcome to come home [Reuters]
Chinese firms listed in the United States would be welcomed home, a senior Shanghai Stock Exchange official said, chiding the main U.S. auditor watchdog and other American institutions for having politicized company accounting issues. Zhou Qinye, the exchange’s vice general manager, said while only a few firms have real accounting issues, many overseas investors are short-selling Chinese companies for profit. “The current situation is the result of some institutions seeking to politicize the matter, and it’s difficult to predict where things are heading,” Zhou told a conference, referring to a spat between U.S. and Chinese regulators over cross-border inspection of audit firms.

Hire a vet, fire someone else [Tax Update]
Joe Kristan shows why wrapping your tax policy with the flag is dumb.

Overstock Abandons O.co [SA]
The shine on the trophy hasn’t even faded!

Timing Questions Emerge on MF Global Cash [WSJ]
Hundreds of millions of dollars might have gone missing from customer accounts at MF Global Holdings Ltd. as far back as four days before the securities firm filed for bankruptcy protection, people familiar with the situation said Monday. The possibility of a shortfall in customer funds on Oct. 27 suggests problems might have emerged sooner than MF Global officials initially indicated to regulators and exchange operator CME Group Inc.

PwC gets America’s Cup deal [SFBT]
A less prestigious firm simply wouldn’t be acceptable for an event that Larry Ellison is obsessed with.

Deficit Deal Might Delay Tax Overhaul [WSJ]
“There could be a two-step process that would hopefully give us pro-growth tax reform,” Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R., Texas) said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” Mr. Hensarling is a co-chairman of the deficit-cutting supercommittee that faces a Nov. 23 deadline for reaching agreement on a plan to cut at least $1.2 trillion from projected future deficits. The approach could ease the path to an agreement, by allowing Congress to reach the outlines of an agreement on tax revenues and spending cuts this year, while postponing the difficult details of a tax overhaul until nexthe issue back to the congressional tax-writing committees. On Sunday, at a press conference in Honolulu where he was hosting the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, President Barack Obama called on Republican lawmakers to soften their resistance to revenue increases as they work on a deal bring the deficit under control, saying he hoped lawmakers will “bite the bullet and do what needs to be done.”

The Folly of the Flat Tax [WSJ]
Figuring out your taxable income can be quite an effort. But once that is done, most taxpayers just look up their tax bill on an IRS-provided table. Those with incomes above $100,000 must perform a simple calculation that involves multiplying two numbers together and adding a third. A flat tax with an exemption would require precisely the same sort of calculation. The net reduction in complexity? Zero.

Olympus Sale Helped Hide Balance Sheet Hole [Bloomberg]
Olympus Corp. (7733)’s 2009 sale of its profitable diagnostics unit may have undermined efforts to expand into health care as the company sought cash to shore up a balance sheet that was hiding decades of losses. Olympus’s then-President Tsuyoshi Kikukawa said the Japanese camera maker was unable to compete in the industry, even as he bought face cream, plastic cookware and recycling companies. A day after Beckman Coulter Inc. (BEC) purchased the Olympus unit, Chief Executive Officer Scott Garrett told analysts the division’s “long and enviable track record of above-market growth” would give an immediate boost to earnings. Barclays Capital upgraded Beckman on the deal.

Rogue Traders, Rogue Firms: The CME, PwC, MF Global and the Legacy of Refco [Re:The Auditors]
FM: “The auditor has complete access, at any time, including to financial systems and reports. They are responsible for issuing an independent opinion on internal controls over financial reporting and for issuing additional reports to the regulators – which they are dependent on- regarding controls over segregated assets per the Commodity Exchange Act. So… When you think about frequency, access, independence, and the fact they get paid well for their services by the shareholders the auditor is in line as the first-responder.”

Romney Tax-Cutting Path to Budget Balance Clouded by Few Savings [Bloomberg]
“Romney may be our only hope, so let’s hope he takes a remedial math course before January 2013,” says former Reagan administration budget director David Stockman. “You can’t get to 20 percent of GDP on spending without taking a fire ax to the Pentagon budget and sharply reducing Social Security payments to the more affluent current retirees.”

Error led to Workforce Central Florida layoffs, controller contends [OS]
Oops: “Three years ago, a former financial controller at Workforce Central Florida says he made a startling discovery. For several months, he said, the agency mistakenly posted expenses twice, making it appear as if Workforce had less money than it really did. By mid-2008, those phantom costs were pushing agency executives to lay off more than 20 workers, he said. The controller said he reported his findings to Workforce’s chief financial officer and chief operating officer, hoping to avert cutbacks. But he said the chief operating officer told him Workforce board members had already been notified about the layoffs, and she was not willing to tell them there had been a mistake.”

KPMG files to shift MF Canadian accounts to RBC [Reuters]
MF Global fired all 1,066 of its brokerage employees on Friday, triggering anger and resentment about the firm’s collapse after bad bets on European debt under former CEO Jon Corzine’s leadership. KPMG said on Saturday it filed the motion with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, seeking authority to transfer certain MF Global Canada Co customer accounts to RBC Dominion Securities Inc.

Programming note: Most of you are working so you probably don’t realize it but today is technically a holiday, therefore we will resume The Daily Grind on Monday and run a shorter editorial schedule today. Caleb returns to your loving embrace Monday morning, so thanks to all of you for a great week, it’s been fun. – AG

PwC’s LGBT employees coming to Dallas for summit [Dallas Voice]
Human Rights Campaign sponsor PricewaterhouseCoopers is holding a two-day diversity summit for members of its LGBT resource group at the Joule Hotel in Downtown Dallas beginning Friday, Nov. 11, in conjunction with Black Tie Dinner st.

Financial Scandal Fans Never Had It So Good: Jonathan Weil [Bloomberg]
If you happen to be a connoisseur of accounting scandals, then the past month or so has been about as good as it gets, capped by the unfolding disaster at Olympus Corp. (7733) On the flip side, if you work as an auditor for a big accounting firm, it just got that much harder to make the case that society should value your services.

Green Mountain’s Landslide [WSJ]
Consider Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, whose shares tumbled 39% after the single-serving coffee company said revenue increased “only” 91% against expectations of around 100%. The trouble: While the shortfall was modest, many Green Mountain investors simply can’t remember being disappointed. And the perfect performance had led them always to give Green Mountain the benefit of the doubt.

Distortions In Baffling Financial Statements [NYT]
This has been a bad year for banks. With sovereign debt no longer trusted and widespread fears of a new recession in Europe, share prices of banks have fallen sharply. But in some cases, the financial statements look ever so much rosier. JPMorgan Chase reported net income of $15.3 billion during the first three quarters of this year, 22 percent higher than in the period a year earlier and a record for the first nine months of any year. There are explanations for that — and JPMorgan Chase deserves praise for calling attention to reasons to think the numbers are misleading. But at base the problem is a simple one: Accounting for financial institutions is a mess.

Audit: IRS responded well to deadly Austin incident [The Hill]
The IRS responded competently and efficiently after a man flew a plane into Austin, Texas, offices of the agency, a new report found. The Treasury Department’s inspector general for tax administration found that the IRS was able to resume work in Austin within 18 days of the February 2010 incident, and had ensured that taxpayer data and IRS employees were protected.

FASB Chairman Adds Two Agenda Projects to Improve Financial Reporting by Not-for-Profit Organizations [MarketWatch]
Leslie F. Seidman, chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), today announced the addition of two agenda projects–a standard-setting project and a research project–intended to improve financial reporting of not-for-profit organizations. The objectives of these projects encompass suggestions received by the Board from its Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee at the Committee’s September 2011 meeting.

Ex-accountants ‘drained tax avoidance scheme of cash’ [The Guardian]
Two former Vantis accountants and ex-tax officials faked documents to siphon money out of tax avoidance schemes marketed to well-known and wealthy individuals, a court heard. Robert “Roy” Faichney and David Perrin, alongside their wives Shirley Faichney and Nicola Perrin, manufactured a series of bogus documents to allow the payment of huge sums from the companies involved in the scheme to a Jersey trust, it was alleged.