FOI Corp officers get 3 years imprisonment

In February 2012, Saitama District Court in Japan, sentenced both the president and executive director of FOI Corp, the machinery maker to three years in prison. The sentencing was due to the involvement of the officers in falsifying the financial statements of the...

The ATM maker loses money

Oki Electric Industry, the maker of ATMs, telecommunications equipment and printers, suspended its Managing Director of its Spanish printer making entity Oki Systems Ibérica S.A.U. amid accounting probe. The MD allegedly overstated the Spanish unit’s accounts...

The future is bleak

The futures brokerage firm Peregrine Financial Group has filed for Chapter 7 protection, after its founder attempted suicide and amid allegations of fraud. It is alleged that more than $200 million had gone missing at the commodities brokerage. In his suicide note,...

IFRS, maybe not for US

Even though FASB (Financial Accounting Standards Board) has been working with the IASB (International Accounting Standards Board) towards convergence of US GAAP with IFRS since 2002, the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) has only recently in 2010, started to...

The radio embezzlement

XM Satellite Radio lost $900,000 of company funds in a case of embezzlement by a former employee. Valencia Person an employee of XM Radio colluded with Brenda Jones another XM Radio employee to defraud the company. The two diverted a couple of dozen payments that were...

Internal control issues at Weatherford Int

Weatherford International Ltd, a Geneva based oilfield services and equipment company, announced that it will be restating its results back to 2007 and delay the 2010 annual report. The delay the company said is due to tax accounting errors stemming from failure of...

Why did Howard Atkins leave Wells Fargo?

Was it really personal reasons that led to Howard Atkins, CFO of Wells Fargo to resign. The buzz is that Atkins resigned because he was involved in an internal dispute regarding financial disclosure in relation to Sarbanes Oxley Act. When most of its competitors are...

Repo 105 email exchange

I recently read an article about the exchange of emails between executives at Lehman Brothers regarding the Repo 105 practice the company was engaged in. Below are some of the comments of the executives- Martin Kelly, Lehman’s global financial controller, stated that...

Japan deciding on IFRS

On February 7 and 8, 2011 members of the Accounting Standards Board of Japan and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) met to update each other on the progress they are making on convergence of their respective Accounting Standards with International...

Another audit firm under attack

In a recent verdict of a nine year legal battle between BDO Seidman and the estate of George Batchelor and the Batchelor Foundation, the jury ordered BDO to pay $91.7 million in damages for fraud and negligence over the firm’s auditing of Grand Court Lifestyles...