American Tower has one again become a target of regulators.

The telecom company said in a regulatory filing it has received a subpoena from the Securities and Exchange Commission requesting certain documents from 2007 through the present, including in particular documents related to the Company's tax accounting and reporting.

Craig M. Lewis has been named the Securities and Exchange Commission's new Chief Economist and  (RiskFin).

Lewis, the Madison S. Wigginton Professor of Finance at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management, is currently a visiting scholar at the SEC and will assume his new role next month.

Five India-based affiliates of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) agreed to pay $7.5 million to regulators to settle charges of conducting deficient audits of Satyam Computer Services and other firms.

The PW India affiliates agreed to pay a $6 million penalty to settle the SEC's charges, the largest ever by a foreign-based accounting firm in an SEC enforcement action.

Federal regulators have charged the former treasurer of a private mortgage lending company for her role in a more than $1.9 billion fraud scheme and an attempt to scam the Treasury's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).

Desiree Brown, the former treasurer of Taylor, Bean & Whitaker (TBW), pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit bank, wire and securities fraud, which contributed to the failures of Colonial Bank and TBW, according to US Attorney Neil H. MacBride for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The former chief financial officer of Freddie Mac will probably face civil charges for his role in the collapse of the mortgage giant.

Anthony Piszel abruptly resigned as CFO of CoreLogic, after receiving a Wells notice from the Securities and Exchange Commission staff in connection with certain disclosure matters during Piszel's tenure at Freddie Mac from November 2006 to September 2008.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged a Kansas company that manages government websites, as well as four current and former executives, including two finance executives, for failing to disclose more than $1.18 million in perquisites to the former chief executive officer.

The Commission alleges that NIC filed false and misleading proxy statements, annual reports and registration statements that failed to disclose Jeffrey Fraser's benefits and falsely represented he worked virtually for free from 2002 until 2005, and continued to materially understate the benefits Fraser received in 2006 and 2007.

The Department of Justice has aggressively ramped up its use of deferred prosecution agreements (DPAs) and non-prosecution agreements (NPAs).

According to a recent detailed report issued by law firm Gibson Dunn, in 2010 there were 32 DPAs and NPAs. This compares with 21 in 2009 and just 19 in 2008. In 2000, there was only one publicly reported DPA.

The US Appeals Court overturned the securities fraud conviction of the former chief financial officer at Network Associates (now called McAfee), who had been sentenced to a year and a day in prison.

In reversing the lower court's decision in the case involving Prabhat Goyal,, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court rebuked the prosecutor and the judge in the case, asserting "The government shouldn't have brought charges unless it had clear evidence of wrongdoing, and the trial judge should have dismissed the case when the prosecution rested and it was clear the evidence could not support a conviction."

The Securities and Exchange Commission's aggressive crackdown on illegal insider trading has snared a former Deloitte Tax LLP partner and his wife.

The pair on Tuesday was accused with repeatedly leaking confidential merger and acquisition information to family members overseas in what the regulator calls a multi-million dollar insider trading scheme.

The SEC alleges that Arnold McClellan, head of one of Deloitte's regional mergers and acquisitions teams, and his wife Annabel provided advance notice of at least seven acquisitions planned by Deloitte's clients to Annabel's sister and brother-in-law in London. The brother-in-law then took positions in US companies that were targets of acquisitions by Arnold McClellan's clients.

The number of companies that have filed their financials late is on the rise this year. But, it is still well below levels of recent years.

According to a recent report from Glass Lewis, 95 companies did not file their quarterly or annual reports on time in the first three months of 2010. This is up slightly from 92 at this point last year.