The Publish What You Pay campaign is where inter­na­tional politics, financial reporting, and the devel­oping world intersect. The campaign seeks to force companies in extractive indus­tries (such as oil and gas) to make public their payments to govern­ments in the devel­oping world. It began in 1999 with an “exposé of the apparent complicity of the oil […]

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The Inter­na­tional Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has announced they won’t be issuing any new standards or major amend­ments to existing standards with effective dates before January 1^st, 2009, in order to give companies reporting under the standards a bit of a breather to get their house in order. Word around the accountant blogos­phere has been tentatively […]

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Brocade Commu­ni­ca­tions Systems has become the first company to be formally inves­ti­gated by the SEC regarding the recent options backdating issue. According to the SEC’s complaint document, which names three former execu­tives of the company as plain­tiffs, from 2000 through 2004 the company inflated net income by under­stating their options-related expense through fraud­ulent schemes to […]

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Enron burst into flames around January 2002. I was just starting my second semester at Brock University in the esteemed Bachelor of Accounting program when the Houston-based company went down. What did this mean to a 19-year-old Canadian accounting student with no share holdings and no knowledge of the energy trading giant from Texas? Actually, a […]

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The accounting standards setting group in the United States is known as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and consists of seven board members who are appointed to five year terms. The most recent appointment was Thomas J. Linsmeier, and CFO.com has a pretty good interview with him on some of the issues currently facing […]

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