•No Evidence Found to Charge Ruth Madoff – The aggression will obviously continue. [WSJ]
•Consumer Interest ‘Huge’ in Clunker Plan, LaHood Says – Call us party poopers but it seems like manufactured consumption. [Bloomberg]
•Pimco: Consumer “greed” hibernating, fear rules – Greed will be good again. Don’t you worry. [Reuters]
Breaking News
- Friday Footnotes: Amateur and Non-Independent Forensic Accounting Not Appreciated By Local Parks Department; KPMG Getting Dogged | 6.26.26
- Top 20 Firm Eide Bailly Gets on the Private Equity Train
- Monday Morning Accounting News Brief: PwC Gave Us a Reason to Mention GTA 6; The Bad KPMG Anecdotes Are Adding Up | 6.22.26
In New AI Guidelines, IRS Politely Suggests You Not Make Up Sources Like Deloitte Did
The IRS sent out a bulletin yesterday and we're going to write about it because for once it's not about tedious tax stuff that our audience doesn't have the patience…
The Big 4 Model Might Be Cooked
For nearly 17 years now, this website you're reading has been meticulously documenting the accounting profession, Big 4 in particular and often through the lens of younger staff coming through…
Layoff Watch ’26: EY Trims Some Newbies in Audit
Seeing multiple posts about audit Staff 1s getting let go from EY this week, it's unclear how many are affected and if other service lines should brace for impact as…
Deloitte Made the Creepy Digital Librarian From The Time Machine But For Golf
Have you seen the 2002 movie The Time Machine? If you haven't then the reference in the headline isn't going to make a lick of sense. Lucky for you YouTube…
KPMG Redefines Excellence in the Age of AI By Using AI to Pump Out Dubious Citations in This Now-Removed Report
GPTZero, the folks who brought you this glorious takedown of an EY Canada report stuffed with completely made up sources, are back at it again and this time they've caught…
Friday Footnotes: Amateur and Non-Independent Forensic Accounting Not Appreciated By Local Parks Department; KPMG Getting Dogged | 6.26.26
Footnotes is a collection of stories from around the accounting profession curated by actual humans and published every Friday at 5pm Eastern. While you're here, subscribe to our newsletter to…
Top 20 Firm Eide Bailly Gets on the Private Equity Train
The private equity train may have slowed a bit in accounting but it's still choo-chooing along with another big deal coming on the heels of Crowe's $3 billion deal with…
Monday Morning Accounting News Brief: PwC Gave Us a Reason to Mention GTA 6; The Bad KPMG Anecdotes Are Adding Up | 6.22.26
Hey, here we are again at Monday. Guess we should get to it. In this news briefA Less Thrilling Transfer Pricing StoryThe Ghost of Tax Preparer Fraud PastWho Doesn't Want…
Friday Footnotes: Deloitte UK Asks Nearly 200 Auditors to Please F Off; AI Chatbots Favored Over Actual Accountants | 6.19.26
Footnotes is a collection of stories from around the accounting profession curated by actual humans and published every Friday at 5pm Eastern. While you're here, subscribe to our newsletter to…
Layoff Watch ’26: EY Trims Some Newbies in Audit
Seeing multiple posts about audit Staff 1s getting let go from EY this week, it's unclear how many are affected and if other service lines should brace for impact as…
In New AI Guidelines, IRS Politely Suggests You Not Make Up Sources Like Deloitte Did
The IRS sent out a bulletin yesterday and we're going to write about it because for once it's not about tedious tax stuff that our audience doesn't have the patience…
Deloitte Made the Creepy Digital Librarian From The Time Machine But For Golf
Have you seen the 2002 movie The Time Machine? If you haven't then the reference in the headline isn't going to make a lick of sense. Lucky for you YouTube…
KPMG Redefines Excellence in the Age of AI By Using AI to Pump Out Dubious Citations in This Now-Removed Report
GPTZero, the folks who brought you this glorious takedown of an EY Canada report stuffed with completely made up sources, are back at it again and this time they've caught…
KPMGers Are Maliciously Complying With The Firm’s AI Usage Requirements By Generating Fluff
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Starbucks Kills Off Its Automated Counting AI Tool After Just 9 Months Because It Sucked at Counting Beans
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Top Remote Tax and Accounting Candidates of the Week | October 16, 2025
Struggling to Find Remote Accounting or Tax Talent? We’ve Got You Covered.If your firm or internal team is having a tough time sourcing qualified remote tax and accounting professionals, you're…
Top Remote Tax and Accounting Candidates of the Week | October 2, 2025
Struggling to Find Remote Accounting or Tax Talent? We’ve Got You Covered.If your firm or internal team is having a tough time sourcing qualified remote tax and accounting professionals, you're…
Top Remote Tax and Accounting Candidates of the Week | September 25, 2025
Struggling to Find Remote Accounting or Tax Talent? We’ve Got You Covered.If your firm or internal team is having a tough time sourcing qualified remote tax and accounting professionals, you're…
Top Remote Tax and Accounting Candidates of the Week | September 18, 2025
Struggling to Find Remote Accounting or Tax Talent? We’ve Got You Covered.If your firm or internal team is having a tough time sourcing qualified remote tax and accounting professionals, you're…
Top Remote Tax and Accounting Candidates of the Week | September 4, 2025
Struggling to Find Remote Accounting Talent? We’ve Got You Covered. If your firm or internal team is having a tough time sourcing qualified remote tax and accounting professionals, you're not…
Twitter Feed
A parks and recreation superintendent in NY "fabricated an independent forensic accounting review and falsely attributed it to an outside accounting firm in an attempt to persuade Town Board members not to eliminate his $8,000 annual stipend"
ANR: Big 4 Model Might Be Cooked • AI Guidelines: IRS Suggests Not Make Up Sources Like Deloitte Did • Top 20 Firm Eide Bailly on Private Equity Train - https://mailchi.mp/accountingfly/big-4-model-might-be-cooked-new-ai-guidelines-irs-politely-suggests-not-make-up-sources-like-deloitte-top-20-firm-eide-bailly-private-equity-t
Here Are Tax and Audit Salaries at Top 25, Top 300, and Regional Firms
Recruiting firm Brewer Morris has released its 2025 US CPA salary guide and should you want to read the whole thing you can request it from them here. Perhaps you,…
Friendly Reminder Not to Work Yourself to Death For This Profession
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Accounting Firm Abruptly Nopes Out of Tax Season Early (UPDATE)
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This Deloitte Office Has Eliminated Trash Cans at Desks to Make Staff Get Up Off Their Asses
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The IRS Decided to Troll Tax Pros For 10/15
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Top Remote Accounting Freelancers: February 3, 2024
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Don’t Grow Your Accounting Firm Out of Business! Break Up With These Unscalable Practices Now
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Stanford CFO to Plead Guilty After Pleading Not Guilty
This after speculation earlier about whether Davis would flip. Looks like he’s going to sing:
James Davis, the former chief financial officer of Stanford Financial Group and who is facing charges related to an alleged $7bn fraud at the group, intends to plead guilty to the three charges against him, his attorney told the Financial Times.
Attorney David Finn, who is representing only Mr Davis, told the FT there would likely be a “procedural not guilty plea” entered at his arraignment, but that his client would ultimately plead guilty to the charges against him “once all the details are worked out.” Mr Davis is due to appear in court in Houston on July 13.
You got that ticket to hell stamped, Stan?
Stanford CFO James Davis “intends to plead guilty”, laywer [sic] says [FT Alphaville]
SEC Still Stonewalling, Considering Slowing Down the PCAOB Even More
The SEC gave Congress a little tease about what happened at the Commission re: totally missing the boat on this Madoff thing. But then again, not really.
Inspector General David Kotz made recommendations about ways that the Commission could improve its oversight over the financial industry because, obv, it had nothing to do with the fact that no one there had the background to detect classic Ponzi schemes.
Some recommendations that Kotz made included giving the PCAOB more oversight including jurisdiction over accounting firms that audit investment advisors and broker-dealers. That’s just what the PCAOB needs, more on its docket because it gets things done so quickly.
Kotz would also like to see an amendment to the Securities Act of 1940 that would require investment managers, including hedge funds, to place their securities with custodians that are registered with a national exchange. Kotz claims that this would prevent investment advisers from fraudulently using the proceeds received from new investors to pay old investors (a la Ponzi).
That’s all fine and dandy but Rep. Paul Kanjorski, of Pennsylvania has been asking for details on the Madoff ball dropping for the last two weeks and the Commission has been stalling. Kotz could only state that the Commission is “proceeding ‘in an expeditious manner.'”
Translation: We don’t have any idea how we missed the biggest Ponzi scheme in history.
Best we can expect, Kotz says, is that the report to be issued by the end of August. Which might be enough time to get Kanjorski involved in a sex scandal and maybe this will all just go away for the Commission.
S.E.C. Previews Its Madoff Report [DealBook/NYT]
Deloitte Throws Up its Hands Regarding Missing Gold
The Royal Canadian Mint (RCM) had a discrepancy between their book inventory of precious metals and the actual count, so natch, they called in a Big 4 accounting firm to do an audit and get to the bottom of this.
Deloitte got the honor of investigating and…wait for it…determined that there is gold missing. 17,500 ounces to be precise, worth about 15.3 million Canadian Dollars (approximately $13.2 USD). Oh, and there’s probably some silver missing too.
In classic auditor fashion, Big D issued a recommendation to the RCM to review its security.
Audit fails to find missing gold [BBC]
Oliver Stone Movie on Goldman Sachs to be Coming This Fall
Because we love ourselves a good cat fight, we feel obligated to tell you about the current scratch and screech fest currently going on between Goldman Sachs and Matt Taibbi, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone. Taibbi wrote a less than flattering article on Goldman in Rolling Stone’s latest issue (which is not available online. Read: Lame).
Why, do you ask, would Goldman waste their time on an article in a formerly renown, now ridiculously corporate magazine? For starters, Taibbi describes GS this way, “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity.”
Not a lot of room for subjective interpretation there. Quoting a response from a Goldman spokesman via the New York Post, “The bank’s spokesman, Lucas Van Praag, [said]: ‘[Taibbi’s] story is an hysterical compilation of conspiracy theories,’ he wrote in an e-mail. ‘Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F. Kennedy’s assassination] and faking the first lunar landing.'”
We admit, on one hand, that Taibbi might be a tad on the nutty side but the mere fact that Goldman is acknowledging the article with any kind of response puts us in the strangely curious camp.
Goldman Gotcha [New York Post]
Scoping | 07.01.09
A Forecast With Hope Built In – Hope has got nothing on reality [New York Times]
Justice Department demands UBS client names – “Swiss bank UBS AG ”systematically and deliberately” violated U.S. law by dispatching private bankers to recruit wealthy Americans interested in evading taxes and must be forced to reveal the identities of 52,000 of those clients, the Justice Department said in a court filing in Miami Tuesday.” [AP via Miami Herald]
ADP Estimates U.S. Companies Cut Payrolls by 473,000 – Estimates ahead of tomorrow’s number keep us under 10% unemployment! Cross your fingers! [Bloomberg]
Review Comments | 06.30.09
So You Say You Want To Be Melissa Francis’s Pool Boy? [DealBreaker]
Stanford Stays in Jail as Judge Revokes Bail [DealBook/NYT]
Bank of America accused of anti-consumer practices – If by, “anti-consumer practices”, you mean Ken Lewis hoarding the Maker’s Mark, then he pleads no contest. [Reuters]
BDO, Looking to Spread Out Some Liability, Admits New Partners
As you probably know, BDO Seidman is having a rough year. Tax shelter prosecutions and trials for the International Global Coordination firm that now falls on the U.S. make for some big liability exposure.
The obvious solution to this conundrum? Spreading the love!
BDO Seidman, LLP, is pleased to announce that 10 new partners have been admitted to the partnership, effective July 1, 2009. Five of the new partners are in the tax practice, four are in the assurance business line and one is in BDO Consulting. BDO Seidman, LLP is a leading national professional services firm providing assurance, tax, financial advisory and consulting services to private and publicly traded businesses.”I am very proud to welcome each of these very deserving individuals to our partnership,” said Jack Weisbaum, CEO of BDO Seidman. “The key to maintaining momentum in our profession is a commitment to recruiting, training and retaining superior client service professionals. Each of these new partners is an example of our commitment to human capital development.”
What are the chances that these new partners are some of the most hated people in the firm? C’mon, $520 million judgment hanging out there, the bigwigs have to be thinking, “well, as long as we’re screwed, we may as well stick it to some people within the firm we don’t like.”
Congrats to the new partners!
BDO Seidman, LLP, Admits 10 New Partners [BDO Seidman Press Release]
SEC Rule Would Crack Down on Celebrity Board Members
Now that the SEC has got this Ponzi thing under control, it can focus on more important matters like getting famous people off companies’ board of directors because, you know, they don’t really know shit about the companies they serve.
Perfect example: Tommy Franks, former commander of forces in Iraq, who resigned his seat on Bank of America’s board last week, was on the audit committee. The AUDIT COMMITTEE.
That’s actually not even the best example. According to Bloomberg, everyone’s favorite acquitted killer, O.J. Simpson was on the audit committee of Infinity Broadcasting Corporation before he was charged with murder in 1994. O.J. Simpson. Audit committee. Yes.
We could go on to tell you about Lance Armstrong missing 11 board meetings but still getting paid over $70,000 by Morgans Hotel Group or Gerald Ford sitting on the Board of Traveler’s Insurance (owned by Citi) until he was 85 years old but you get the picture.
This is your SEC, citizens of America, getting their shit together since 1934.
Armstrong, ‘Celebrity’ Directors Targeted in SEC Rule [Bloomberg]
Philip Morris: Hey, We Do Good You Know
The benevolence of a cigarette company is quite a touching thing. Footnoted.org has a post […]
Uncategorized
PwC Needs a Lesson or Two in Spin
In “let’s talk about anything but Satyam” PwC news, the largest Big 4 firm was […]
Score One for U.S. GAAP
U.S. GAAP just got a little boost in its image versus its sexy rival, IFRS, courtesy of Audit Integrity, a research services firm.
Audit Integrity studied filings by European companies from 2001 to 2008, looking at filings both pre and post IFRS adoption. The objectives were, “to determine whether IFRS has been implemented consistently across Europe, whether it has resulted in a common method of reporting financial data, and how the depth and comparability of data under IFRS compares to U.S. GAAP.”
At first glance, one might think that with all the bashing of U.S. GAAP in recent years that this was IFRS chance to prove once and for all that it was the new cock of the walk.
Well, not so fast GAAP haters:
“Based on our analysis, we are not seeing a significant improvement in financial reporting when companies shift to IFRS,” said Jack Zwingli, CEO of Audit Integrity. “We found that IFRS is a common standard, but there are significant variances in IFRS reporting, in the completeness of information, the timeliness and the filing frequency.”
Sounds like IFRS ain’t all that does it? You want more?
The firm says overall there are indications that financial reporting is more consistent and more comparable under IFRS than before IFRS adoption in Europe, but it’s not clear that IFRS represents an improvement over U.S. GAAP. In fact, the firm’s report says GAAP filers may have an edge over IFRS filing in terms of the timeliness, depth and breadth of financial data provided to investors.
Ouch, IASB. You want the best part? The Europeans disclose less on executive compensation than we do here in America. You’re all familiar with how popular corporate executives are. To wit:
[Jack] Zwingli [Audit Integrity CEO] said he was also surprised that the analysis revealed IFRS generally provides less information about executive compensation. “It’s not good in the United States, but it’s better than it is in Europe,” he said. “There is more consistency in reporting and deeper coverage of data under GAAP than under IFRS.”
Seems like IFRS has got work to do…IASB, you can call us when you want to get serious.
Study Pokes Holes in IFRS Reporting Quality, Consistency [Accounting & Auditing Update/Compliance Week]