Accounting Today - May 2012

Spirit
FROM PAGE 23
what statement users need assur-
ances about, namely that a com-
pany’s reports can be relied on to
be free from fraud and otherwise
truthful. For decades, auditors have
obstinately said they can’t do those
things but that they can attest to
compliance with worthless GAAP.
If today’s auditors cannot deliver
what markets need, it’s time to find
new ones who can. Here’s unargu-
able truth: Doing what isn’t useful
cannot be justified by the difficulty
of doing what is useful. And here is a
corollary: If something isn’t useful,
it isn’t worth doing.

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should provide assurance that financial statements are trustworthy. But who’s providing that assurance? It’s management’s decades-old friend who accepts payment in return for saying, “Everything’s fine.” Of course, that’s an oversimplification, but it does provide insight into the problems that the PCAOB is tackling. Rotation is but a baby step to increase perceived professional skepticism. Because the next step would have auditors paid by a trust fund, instead of their clients, we think they ought to accept rotation thankfully. Instead, they’ve run to Congress for protection. Balderdash.

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THUNDER AFTER LIGHTNING We hope this lightning run through these issues will create thunder in the form of new ideas. After all, stagnation is the biggest problem facing all of accounting. Surely, we need very fresh innovative ideas, instead of warmed-over ancient ones.

Our perennial goal is to keep raising significant questions to stimulate a new vision that is desperately needed now more than ever. The good news is that the most influential regulatory bodies are liberated like never before and poised to create real progress. We encourage them to do it now. AT

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count Reporting] has increased successively with each of the three programs, so that those who waited until the current 2012 amnesty program to report their offshore income and assets pay a penalty of up to 27. 5 percent of those assets, as compared to the 20 percent FBAR penalty due under the 2009 amnesty program,” said Michael Foster, a partner in Venable LLP’s Tax Group in Los Angeles.

As a result of the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Kawashima v. Holder, the program is now vitally important for green card holders and other resident aliens, according to Foster. In Kawashima, the Supreme Court held that conviction of a criminal tax offense, other than tax evasion, constitutes a deportable offense.