Call for Perjury Probe of Fannie Ex-execs

The chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA, or Fannie Mae) has called for a perjury investigation of its former top executives.Rep. Richard Baker (R-La.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance, and Government Sponsored...

By Stephen Taub • June 15, 2006

Congress, FASB Grappling with Pensions

Washington’s difficulties in hammering out a major funding bill before the July 4 recess have been complicated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s pension-accounting project, the chairman of a joint Senate-House committee suggested on Wednesday.Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) made his observati...

By David Katz • June 14, 2006

Explore the Trendline➔

Tax policy shifts: What CFOs need to know to stay ahead

Discover how evolving tax policies are creating new opportunities and challenges for CFOs.

By CFO.com staff

Convergence in Five Years: IASB Chairman

Within five years, differences in accounting standards worldwide will be small, according to Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board. In another three to five years after that, U.S. and global standards will be virtually interchangeable, says Financial Accounti...

By Helen Shaw • June 14, 2006

Gemstar Settles with Former CFO

Gemstar-TV Guide International announced that former chief financial officer Elsie Leung relinquished all claims to roughly $8.4 the company had been holding in a segregated account as part of a settlement stemming from the company’s November 2002 restructuring.According to the company, Leung als...

By Stephen Taub • June 13, 2006

Mercury Voids Former CEO’s Option Grants

A special Mercury Interactive Corp. committee looking into past stock-option awards has voided more than 2.6 million vested and unexercised options granted to Amnon Landan, the company’s former CEO. The committee found that the options, granted between 1997 and 2002, were dated improperly, accord...

By Stephen Taub • June 9, 2006

FASB, CPAs Eye Private-Company Changes

(Corrected: An earlier version of this story inaccurately stated that the AICPA set accounting and financial reporting standards before the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. In fact, the accounting society’s role had been to set auditing standards.)Shut out of rulemaking since the creation of the Publi...

By David Katz • June 8, 2006

Wells Notices for Former Delphi Execs

The Securities and Exchange Commission has sent Wells notices to at least seven former executives of Delphi, which is being investigated for possible accounting fraud, according to the Detroit News, which cited two lawyers familiar with the investigation.A number of executives were forced to resi...

By Stephen Taub • June 7, 2006

Tax Deal Gives HP a $443 Million Boost

Hewlett-Packard announced that it has restated results for the April 30, 2006, quarter upward by $443 million after settling a tax audit with the Internal Revenue Service. The audit stemmed from its federal returns for 1996 through 1998. The company received no cash from the settlement, reported ...

By Stephen Taub • June 7, 2006

Execs’ Letters Rip FASB Pension Draft

Many senior finance executives fear that the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s plan for overhauling pension accounting will place an onerous crunch on year-end closes that have already grown frantic.FASB’s plan to provide clearer and fuller accounting of pensions and other postretirement ben...

By David Katz • June 6, 2006

Judge Approves KPMG Tax Settlement

A federal judge has approved the $153.9 million settlement of KPMG and law firm Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood with wealthy tax-shelter investors, according to published accounts.U.S. District Judge Dennis M. Cavanaugh reportedly called the agreement, initially reached in October, “fair, reason...

By Stephen Taub • June 2, 2006

Former HealthSouth CFO Settles with SEC

Former HealthSouth chief financial officer William Owens has agreed to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges regarding his former company’s $2.7 billion accounting scandal.He was one of five ex-CFOs of the failed company who pleaded guilty and testified against their onetime boss, for...

By Stephen Taub • June 2, 2006

SEC Takes No Action Against Flowserve

Flowserve, a provider of industrial flow-management services, has announced that the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission has concluded its investigation of the company’s restatements without recommending any enforcement action.The SEC launched its inquiry in February 2004, shortly aft...

By Stephen Taub • June 2, 2006

Vivendi Settles Tax Dispute for $686 Million

Vivendi has announced that it agreed to pay $686 million to resolve a tax dispute with the Internal Revenue Service stemming from its 2000 acquisition of Seagram.The French media giant explained that the IRS, which was contesting a tax treatment applied by Seagram related to its sale of DuPont sh...

By Stephen Taub • June 2, 2006

Tax Time Will Be More Taxing: Survey

Reporting tax liabilities to the Internal Revenue Service and to shareholders is becoming more costly and time-consuming due to new requirements of the IRS and the Financial Accounting Standards Board, according to a survey of finance executives.Accounting firm Grant Thornton, which conducted the...

By Helen Shaw • June 1, 2006

Impath Exec Sentenced to Prison

The former president of cancer-data company Impath has been sentenced to 3½ years in prison for his role in the company’s financial fraud, according to published reports.Richard P. Adelson, who was convicted in February of conspiracy, securities fraud, and filing false statements with the Securit...

By Stephen Taub • May 31, 2006

Must Reading for IRS Agents?

Treasurers and corporate-tax officials are worrying that new Financial Accounting Standards Board disclosure requirements will supply Internal Revenue Service agents with a “roadmap” to companies’ most questionable and controversial tax positions.FASB’s final guidance on how to account for uncert...

By Helen Shaw • May 31, 2006

GE e-file is IRS’s Largest

General Electric filed an electronic tax return earlier this month, turning what would have been 24,000 pages of paper into about 240 megabytes of information. It took GE 30 minutes to send the document to the Internal Revenue Service, and within an hour, the company had verification that its ret...

By Marie Leone • May 31, 2006

Late-filing Notices Up in First Quarter

For the first quarter of this year, late-filing notices by accelerated filers rose 32 percent compared with the first quarter of 2005, according to a new report from Glass, Lewis.This month, 120 companies with a market capitalization of $75 million or more notified the Securities and Exchange Com...

By Stephen Taub • May 26, 2006

BofA Hedges Spur Five-year Restatement

Bank of America Corp. will restate financial reports dating back to 2001 as a result of missteps in its accounting treatment for derivative deals.Some of the bank’s revisions will cut earnings for 2003, 2004, and 2005 by 0.5 percent, 1.4 percent, and 2.5 percent, respectively, the company stated ...

By Stephen Taub • May 26, 2006

Software Capitalization Clouds Comparisons

Fewer than 30 percent of software companies capitalize their development costs, according to a new study. But the companies that take a less conservative accounting approach and capitalize those costs do so at a high rate and make cross-industry comparisons difficult, says accounting professor Ch...

By Helen Shaw • May 26, 2006

UTStarcom Restates Over Revenue Recognition

UTStarcom, Inc. said it will restate its results for nearly three years due to premature revenue recognition on a contract with a customer in India, as well as several other transactions.The maker of wireless network equipment and cellular phones said it will lower revenue by a total of $49.6 mil...

By Stephen Taub • May 25, 2006

IRS Hangs Up on Telephone Tax

Can you hear me now? The Treasury Department announced Thursday that it has given up its fight to keep alive a federal excise tax on long-distance telephone service. As a result, the Internal Revenue Service will issue refunds in 2007.In aggregate, refunds will total $15 billion for individual an...

By Marie Leone • May 25, 2006

Dresser Inc. to Restate Results

Dresser Inc. disclosed that it will restate its financials for 2004 and the first three quarters of 2005 to correct a number of accounting errors. The engineering company, which did not provide specific figures, added that it may also need to restate for periods prior to 2004.The restatements ori...

By Stephen Taub • May 24, 2006

Fannie Mae to Pay $400 Million in Settlement

The Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA, or Fannie Mae) has agreed to pay $400 million to settle charges relating to its $10.8 billion restatement.In its settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission and Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO), the mortgage giant n...

By Stephen Taub • May 23, 2006

Options Probes Sprouting All Over

Software provider Openwave Systems, router maker Juniper Networks, and Internet media company CNET Networks on Monday disclosed inquiries into their stock-option granting practices. Openwave announced that the Securities and Exchange Commission has launched an informal inquiry and is requesting r...

By Stephen Taub • May 22, 2006