An audit found that the top managers Sweetwater Union High School District in California may be guilty of fraud and lying to credit rating agencies and the board of trustees. The audit came after the district’s budget came up $30 million short in 2018, with reports that despite knowledge of Read More
A Supreme Court ruling limiting the fines the Securities and Exchange Commission can impose on defendants to repay victims of fraud may lead to lower payouts to whistleblowers. Earlier this week the Supreme Court upheld the SEC’s right to disgorgement of funds that resulted from fraud, in an 8-1 ruling, Read More
Increases in director-and-officer (D&O) insurance are rising as companies are now paying more to insure their top-level executives in the case of a lawsuit. The increase comes as shareholder litigation rises in both number of cases and size of settlements. With greater risks in the market and more expensive insurance, Read More
The accounting woes of German digital payments company, Wirecard AG, appear to be deepening. The company said in a statement on Monday that there is a “prevailing likelihood” that the 1.9 billion euros ($2.15 billion) missing from its accounts had never existed in the first place. Wirecard first announced the Read More
Commerzbank’s London unit was fined 37.8 million pounds ($47.3 million) by the U.K. for failing to have proper money-laundering controls, according to the Financial Conduct Authority. The bank, Germany’s second-largest lender, did not conduct on-time due diligence checks on 1,772 customers in 2017, and most of the clients had continued Read More
General Electric announced today that Deloitte was selected to replace KPMG as its auditor in a press release. KPMG will complete its audit services for GE ending Dec. 31, 2020 and will file GE’s 2020 Annual Report on Form 10-K. KPMG and its predecessor firms have worked with GE since Read More
An internal audit found “woefully lax” security in the Central Intelligence Agency’s hacking unit which led to the theft and leak of top-secret hacking tools in 2016. The stolen information was leaked by an employee and released by WikiLeaks in 2017, a disclosure totaling about 8,000 pages with details about Read More
The second-largest lender in Australia, Westpac, says that millions of breaches of anti-money laundering (AML) laws resulted from technology shortcomings and human error, but were not intentional, according to an internal audit. Westpac has recently faced accusations of 23 million instances of AML compliance violations, including failures to detect money Read More
The UK Financial Reporting Council (FRC) reprimanded Big Four KPMG after the accounting firm admitted to shortcomings in audit work. The accounting watchdog said the firm had issues in reserve audits of Foresight 4 VCT plc that led to the company having to restate its distributable reserves twice. The FRC Read More
When it comes to accounting firms, the big are getting bigger. The top ten largest audit firms boosted their share of the external auditing market in 2019, according to a new report by research firm Audit Analytics. The report finds that the market share held by the 10 biggest firms Read More
