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Double-listed the company’s assets to induce a bank to continue financing its operations.
Steven Garfinkel, former chief financial officer of defunct health-care finance company DVI, was sentenced to 30 months in prison and ordered to pay $51 million in restitution, reported the Philadelphia Business Journal.
Last December, Garfinkel pleaded guilty to mail fraud and to violating the […]

Nicor Inc. (NYSE:GAS) today announced that it has reached a settlement agreement with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (”SEC”) resolving charges filed today against the company in connection with the SEC’s investigation of the results of the company. The company had announced in 2002 that the SEC had begun a formal investigation in […]

Commission announced it will hold an open meeting on April 4, to discuss the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s proposed auditing standard for Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the coordination of the proposed changes with the SEC’s own guidance concerning implementation.
Both proposals were published for public comment in December 2006, with the comment […]

The Securities and Exchange Commission can now nominate its own candidates for the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
Under an agreement between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the parent foundation of the Financial Accounting Standards Board, the SEC will have more authority over the appointment of members of the private board, The Wall Street Journal reported […]

Financial reporting is changing around the world and the implications are even being felt across the pond
When a tide turns you can hear, down on the foreshore, a huge noise. It is the sound of pebbles being pulled this way and that as the waters change direction. Journalists love the idea of tides turning. It […]

A Businessman Who Keeps the Books
For thousands of investors and executives at publicly traded companies, Conrad W. Hewitt may be one of the most important Washington civil servants they’ve never heard of.
The chief accounting guru at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Hewitt stands at the center of numerous burning policy debates — from how far […]

Phoenix, a new computer system, should simplify tracking, collecting, and distributing billions of dollars of penalties, says Chairman Cox in his budget statement.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is creating a new office dedicated to disbursing money to investors harmed in securities-fraud cases.
Under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, the SEC became the fund holder for the […]

A vast transatlantic stock market emerged on Tuesday when the New York Stock Exchange won control of pan-European market operator Euronext, creating an entity worth 29 billion dollars linking trading platforms in six cities.
The two markets said in a statement that the NYSE had acquired 91.42 percent of Euronext capital and 92.22 percent of the […]

America’s Most Trustworthy Companies
Alexander the Great is reputed to have said, “Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.”
More than two millennia on, the words of the Macedonian king echo true in the boardrooms of America, where the tainted winds of option backdating, insider trading and questionable pension accounting blow fitfully–along with the […]

A lobbyist for big business last week vowed to continue challenging the constitutionality of a 2002 anti-fraud law after a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit the group brought against the independent board Congress created to oversee the accounting industry.
The Free Enterprise Fund, which filed the suit in February 2006, argued that the Public Company Accounting […]