"Under the mattress" seems like a better and better investment plan

Auditors “Monkeying Around with Documents,” Top PCAOB Cop Says

Claudius Modesti, the director of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Division of Enforcement and Investigations, revealed yesterday that the PCAOB is running into resistance -- and even evidence of tampering -- by the accounting firms it regulates. “We’re facing a non-cooperation situation across audit firms of various sizes,” he said during a Practicing Law Institute event.

When the PCAOB’s inspectors tell a firm they are coming to look over its work, “people will start monkeying around with documents,” Modesti says. Most of these incidents are hidden from public view, however, since details about the PCAOB’s routine inspections are scarce. And until a settlement is reached, the regulator can’t disclose anything about ongoing investigations that could lead to enforcement actions.

Nothing about PCAOB proceedings – not even the fact that an accounting firm is under investigation – can be publicly revealed until after a settlement. As a result, respondents to its accusations tend to push back for delays.

The delays and cloaked status of these cases haven't sat well with PCAOB board members and staff. They've requested legislation to address what they see as the problem that the public is not receiving information it needs to know. They have urged Congress to tweak the Sarbanes-Oxley Act so that more information about ongoing investigations can be disclosed.

Ed. note: Everyone who believes that's going to happen, stand on your head.

Sometimes, the PCAOB may be scrutinizing the actions of an accounting firm related to a significant Securities and Exchange Commission against a company. But even in such cases, the public may not be aware of that fact that the PCAOB is investigating the company's accounting firm, Modesti noted. As a result, a PCAOB investigation does not have a deterrent effect on auditor misdeeds. Pending bills in the House of Representatives and the Senate would make the PCAOB’s disciplinary proceedings public.

Possibly if George Zimmerman lived in a state where it was a lot harder to obtain a gun

He wouldn't have had to wonder whether Trayvon Martin was armed.

QOTD

Katha Pollitt:

When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. Ann says Mitt called it more important work than his own, which does make you wonder why he didn’t stay home with the boys himself. When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

So there it is: the difference between a stay-home mother and a welfare mother is money and a wedding ring. Unlike any other kind of labor I can think of, domestic labor is productive or not, depending on who performs it. For a college-educated married woman, it is the most valuable thing she could possibly do, totally off the scale of human endeavor. What is curing malaria compared with raising a couple of Ivy Leaguers? For these women, being supported by a man is good—the one exception to our American creed of self-reliance. Taking paid work, after all, poses all sorts of risks to the kids. (Watch out, though, ladies: if you expect the father of your children to underwrite your homemaking after divorce, you go straight from saint to gold-digger.) But for a low-income single woman, forgoing a job to raise children is an evasion of responsibility, which is to marry and/or support herself. For her children, staying home sets a bad example, breeding the next generation of criminals and layabouts.

All of which goes to show that it is not really possible to disengage domestic work from its social, gendered context: the work is valuable if the woman is valuable, and what determines her value is whether a man has found her so and how much money he has. That is why discussions of domestic labor and its worth are inextricably bound up with ideas about class, race, respectability, morality and above all womanhood. You can talk all you want about equal parenting; nobody is raising his son from earliest childhood to see as the most important job in the world being a stay-home father dependent on a high-earning wife. Nobody says to men in college, “You can be a physicist, or you can be a homemaker—it’s your choice!”

Okay, it's a little more than a single quote, but I couldn't choose.