Posts Tagged ‘ICFR’
PCAOB Lists 2023 Inspection Priorities
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has released its list of priorities for audit firm inspections in 2023, in case any internal audit and financial compliance teams want to understand where your auditor is feeling the pressure and how that pressure might fall through onto you. The PCAOB releases such a list every spring after…
Read MoreReport: Accounting Lawsuits Getting Pricey
Good news for anyone arguing for more investment in strong internal accounting controls: fresh research shows that companies are paying a lot more money to settle the lawsuits that follow when your weak accounting controls screw things up. So says Cornerstone Research, an outfit that has been tracking the trends in class-action lawsuits for years.…
Read MoreAn Update on SOX Compliance Issues
The season for Sarbanes-Oxley audits is now mostly behind us, which means we’re moving into the season of webinars about this year’s SOX audits and lessons we can learn for future years. I attended one such webinar this week and am here to pass along my notes. The webinar itself was run by audit firm…
Read MoreNew COSO Help on Sustainability Reporting
COSO dropped extensive new guidance this week on how companies can build effective internal control over sustainability reporting, to assure that the ESG disclosures your company might make have the same accuracy and reliability that exists for financial reporting. COSO published the guidance on Thursday — 114 pages of it, walking the reader through every…
Read MoreCybersecurity Risk: Something’s Happening
I was working at my desk last week when the phone rang. At the other end of the line was my friend the cybersecurity auditor. “Dude, we have to talk,” he said. “Our team here has discovered an issue.” Ummm, a lot of people in our line of work have issues, I replied. Can you…
Read MoreAn SEC Statement on Restatements
The top accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission wants corporate executives and audit committees to do better at evaluating when financial restatements are necessary, saying that too many tilt their analysis toward the conclusion that, nope, that error we had last quarter doesn’t need to be restated after all. Paul Munter, the SEC’s acting…
Read MoreNotes on Assessing Your Internal Controls
One of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s senior enforcement officials gave a pep talk in Washington this week about the importance of internal controls, and how a company should evaluate its internal controls this winter as the world tries to prevail over the disruptions of covid-19. The official was Matthew Jacques, chief accountant in the…
Read MoreMore SEC Talk on Cyber, Internal Control
Before this particular bit of news sails downstream, internal control professionals might want to note that an SEC commissioner spoke this week about the importance of internal controls for cybersecurity. She raised a few points worth considering. The remarks came from Caroline Crenshaw, a Democratic appointee to the Securities and Exchange Commission who, in my…
Read MoreAnother Example of Spreadsheet Risk
We missed this until now, but a Radical Compliance fan passed along this item for all you internal accounting control enthusiasts: a water development business in Colorado that recently had to correct its financial statements because of sloppy spreadsheet controls. The company in question is Pure Cycle Corp. ($PYCO), which sells water and wastewater services…
Read MoreSEC Straps Leather Company on Control Failures
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a Texas leather goods company with failing to maintain an effective inventory accounting system, which ultimately led the firm to restate two years’ worth of financial results and send its CEO packing. It’s a cautionary tale for the rest of us about how a poor control environment can…
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