There have been scant references in the best animated comedies of our time – The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park – to accountants. One that stands out was in the episode of The Simpsons when the April 15th tax deadline rolled around. Ned Flanders did his taxes on January 1st and mailed them out the [...]

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In Sydney, Australia, an accountant was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill a client who he had stolen almost $84,000 from. He had failed to remit those amounts to the government for taxes owed by the victim. The motive was, unsurprisingly, to “stop Mr Williams from bringing the fraud to light.” This is pretty [...]

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Tech companies are the primary focus of the SEC’s recently announced and currently ongoing investigation into options dating irregularities, which makes sense given their proclivity for awarding stock options as part of compensation packages with employees. An article in BusinessWeek documents what tech company executives have recently termed a “witch hunt”: Many executives are surprised [...]

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No, Google isn’t managing investments. They’re still devoted to “organizing the world’s information,” but that doesn’t matter to the SEC. A rule enacted in 1940 could cause increased regulatory headaches for the company. Companies whose securities make up more than 40 percent of their assets can fall under restrictions that govern the mutual fund industry. [...]

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Sometimes when I’m looking for inspiration for a blog post I’ll scan the news sites for mentions of accounting, in the hopes that there’ll be some new development I can write about. Unfortunately, in accounting, new developments aren’t frequent and usually are pretty boring. It’s the nature of the beast. So when I found this [...]

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