Using racketeering law, which was designed to heavily punish criminal gangs, to convict school teachers and administrators raises an interesting question: Why haven’t other prosecutors used it in other fraud cases, for example, those involving the financial crisis and Great Recession?
Whatever the right solution is for the current Greek crisis, many observers believe that the problems could have been avoided if Greece had not joined the Euro in the first place.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) have issued their long-awaited converged standard on revenue recognition. The rule governs how and when revenues
For big multinational insurance groups, like Allianz, Aviva, Aegon and Mapfre, that have their home office in the EU, Solvency II’s long reach
On December 19, 2014 the Prudential Reporting Authority (PRA) published an update letter from the PRA’s Insurance Directors for all Solvency II-affected firms. The implementation date for Solvency II is set for January 2016. Insurers can now actively resume their efforts to become compliant with this long awaited regulation. Solvency II is aimed to establish…
When it comes to dealing with the Department of Labor, there is only one prudent approach
By now you’ve heard of SaaS (software-as-a-service) and PaaS (platform-as-a-service), but how about CaaS – Crime-as-a-Service?
Recognize whether your organization needs to make major infrastructure changes, and get the ball rolling if it does.
There is a theory of tort law that liability should be apportioned based on who could most efficiently have assured that a tortious event did not take place. If that standard were applied to the Bernie Madoff fiasco, the auditing profession would owe a whole lot of money to a whole lot of people. It’s a shame that the thoroughness, doggedness, and precision the profession is known for wasn’t applied to its own practitioners.
My nostalgia for this whole kerfuffle arises because after a six-month trial, a jury has just returned guilty verdicts against five of Madoff’s former employees. To understand why this event has raised unpleasant memories and unresolved concerns, let’s have a short Socratic dialogue:
For decades, financial managers have pieced together and manipulated spreadsheets in order to report on past data and maintain the financial integrity of their businesses. Sure, if they had time, they could use these primitive tools to attempt to identify trends and offer insights. But this effort was ridden with information silos, dirty data and outdated numbers.
Fortunately, times are changing.