After three consecutive years of decline, audit fees as a percentage of revenue of Independent Auditors increased slightly in 2009, points out a new comprehensive study for Audit Analytics.

However, the research firm says that as with non-audit fees, the uptick is due to a decrease in revenues instead of an increase in fees.  It stresses the fees declined despite the extra work demanded of independent auditors during the same period when more and more companies were required to obtain a auditor attestations required under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

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.

The chairman of the PCAOB said auditors of financial companies that contributed to the financial crisis several years ago are now the subject of pending PCAOB investigations and may lead to disciplinary actions against firms or individuals.

"The PCAOB inspected the audits of many of the issuers that later failed or received federal bail-out funds," said PCAOB chairman James Doty at a PCAOB Investor Advisory Group Meeting on Wednesday. "In several cases - including audits involving substantial financial institutions - PCAOB inspection teams identified what they determined to be audit failures of such significance that, in the inspectors' view, the firm had failed to support its opinion."

Doty stressed that under the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the accounting watchdog group's disciplinary actions must remain confidential until both its proceeding and any SEC appeal are finished, adding that this will take a long time.

Since the day it became law in the summer of 2002, Sarbanes-Oxley has always had a chorus of critics and should even be dismantled.

It's too expensive, too over-reaching, not well thought out, encourages companies to list overseas, doesn't really reign in fraud. Pick your reason for disdaining to governance rules.

Companies are switching auditors at a more rapid clip these days.

According to Glass Lewis, 61 companies changed auditors in the first three quarters of 2010, 33 percent more than in the same period last year.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

American Apparel's downward spiral continues as Bloomberg reports that the company has been subpoenaed by the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY over the company's "change in accounting firms."

Submitted by Caleb Newquist, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

The PCAOB has had a pretty good run of late. It all started with the SCOTUS handing them a loss that was really a win and the Board has, most recently, gotten ambitious with new risk assessment standards. What's more is the call of acting Chair Dan Goelzer to have the Board's enforcement inspections held publicly so audit firms can't get all mysterio about what they did and did not do to warrant said inspection.

Submitted by Adrienne Gonzalez, republished from Going Concern, Accounting News for Accountants and CFOs.

If we still care about financial reform, we should especially care about proposed changes to the Government Accounting Standards Board because, let's face it, government accounting could really use a helping hand. Were government pensions forced to use the same reporting rules as every other pension, a $3 trillion hole would open up and we would see immediately that rules in desperate need of repair have remained broken because the current system allows the truth to be buried in the footnotes.

Anyone counting on regulation alone to prevent the world from falling into another financial black hole will be sorely disappointed, a group of experts warned in an article published yesterday by the International Federation of Accountants.

The experts say that all key parties to the financial disaster--from regulators to managers and investors--share the blame and that tighter regulation alone can therefore go only so far to prevent another crisis from materializing.