Accountability

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced yesterday that it would hold a two-day public meeting in March to receive input on auditor independence and audit firm rotation.

After negotiations with its European Union counterparts in Paris last week, U.S. tax authorities have agreed to propose changes to the way that foreign income is reported due to concerns voiced by banks and governments that the current model breaches privacy and is unnecessarily complex, according to the Financial Times.

President Barack Obama is in the process of forming a special unit within the Justice Department’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force devoted to investigating abusive lending and securitization practices during the buildup to the economic crisis, and has asked New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to lead it, according to MSNBC.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the last remaining member of the president’s original economic team, said that if Obama is re-elected this year it is unlikely that he will remain in the White House, according to Bloomberg.

While the five largest banks have agreed to overhaul their mortgage lending practices and pay $25 billion as part of a settlement agreement over deceptive practices, some state attorneys general have balked at the proposed deal, despite political pressure from the White House to sign on, according to the Associated Press.

The roughly 98,000 men and women employed nationwide by the federal government ended FY 2010 owing about one billion dollars worth of unpaid back taxes, according to the Washington Post, $32 million higher than last year’s total, despite a slight dip in the number of delinquent employees.

Former New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine has probably not had a single good day since the collapse of MF Global, the commodities brokerage firm that he led through both its meteoric rise and spectacular failure, which resulted in more than a billion dollars just plain vanishing into thin air.

In a Dec. 23 release, the U.S Government Accountability Office announced that it couldn't render an opinion on the federal government's 2011 consolidated financial statements. The GAO cited "widespread material internal control weaknesses, significant uncertainties, and other limitations."

1. Serious financial management problems at the Department of Defense (DOD) that made its financial statements unauditable.

In a strong rebuke to the Securities and Exchange Commission practice of allowing companies to settle without admitting to any wrongdoing, a federal judge in Manhattan on Monday rejected a $285 million settlement that had been previously agreed upon between the commission and financial giant Citigroup over alleged fraud charges related to the financial crisis, according to the <