Accountability

The sentencing for David G. Friehling, the auditor of notorious Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff, has been delayed until March 18, 2011, according to a spokesperson for U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein in Manhattan.

New York is one of nine states, along with the District of Columbia, to have secured federal education funding through its placement in the nation-wide Race to the Top program which pitted various states against each other for a share of $3.4 billion in school aid, $700 million in New York’s case.

American International Group (AIG), the too-big-to-fail insurance giant saved from collapse in 2008, announced on Monday that it will be devoting $3.9 billion generated from a recent debt sale to paying down some of the $85 billion that was used to bail out the failing company at the height of the financial crisis.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), in a historic first, has accused the state of New Jersey with securities fraud relating to billions of dollars worth of municipal bond offerings, a charge that has never before been leveled at a state government.

A series of audits conducted by the state comptroller’s office has revealed at least $150 million worth of waste, fraud and abuse in the state’s Medicaid reimbursement system due to what Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli called “pervasive problems with its billing system and policies.”

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli has released the following audits:

Workers’ Compensation Board, Network Security Controls

Auditors examined selected aspects of the security controls in place over a computer network the board relies on. They identified numerous critical weaknesses in these controls.

David G. Friehling, the Rockland County accountant who admitted rubber-stamping convicted swindler Bernard Madoff's financial audits for years has reportedly been stripped of his license by the state.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) approved a set of eight new auditing standards today all relating to risk assessment. First proposed in 2008, the eight standards, approved as a suite, cover risk assessment throughout every stage of an audit from the initial planning stages through the evaluation of the audit results. Acting PCAOB chair Daniel L. Goelzer said that the new standards will promote the use of more sophisticated risk assessments and minimize risk of failure to detect material misstatements. The eight standards are:

A lawsuit seeking to challenge the health care reform lawsuit on constitutional grounds has been allowed to proceed despite efforts by the federal government to get the case dismissed. The decision, penned by U.S. District Judge Henry E.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told big Wall Street firms that they shouldn’t fear the new financial reform law, saying that the new rules and regulations will form the basis for a stronger and more robust economy than the one that existed under the previous set of rules.