Ethics

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board announced yesterday that it would hold a two-day public meeting in March to receive input on auditor independence and audit firm rotation.

President Barack Obama is in the process of forming a special unit within the Justice Department’s Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force devoted to investigating abusive lending and securitization practices during the buildup to the economic crisis, and has asked New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to lead it, according to MSNBC.

While the five largest banks have agreed to overhaul their mortgage lending practices and pay $25 billion as part of a settlement agreement over deceptive practices, some state attorneys general have balked at the proposed deal, despite political pressure from the White House to sign on, according to the Associated Press.

The roughly 98,000 men and women employed nationwide by the federal government ended FY 2010 owing about one billion dollars worth of unpaid back taxes, according to the Washington Post, $32 million higher than last year’s total, despite a slight dip in the number of delinquent employees.

Former New Jersey Governor Jon S. Corzine has probably not had a single good day since the collapse of MF Global, the commodities brokerage firm that he led through both its meteoric rise and spectacular failure, which resulted in more than a billion dollars just plain vanishing into thin air.

In a strong rebuke to the Securities and Exchange Commission practice of allowing companies to settle without admitting to any wrongdoing, a federal judge in Manhattan on Monday rejected a $285 million settlement that had been previously agreed upon between the commission and financial giant Citigroup over alleged fraud charges related to the financial crisis, according to the <

Japanese camera maker and medical equipment manufacturer Olympus, already the subject of a deepening investigation over what its leadership admitted was “extremely inappropriate accounting,” was dealt another blow this week as reports surfaced that the embattled company may have ties to the Yakuza, Japan’s largest organized crime syndicate, according to

Investigators looking into what exactly happened to the $600 million in client funds that went missing amid the collapse of commodities firm MF Global have been snarled by the company’s poor record keeping practices, making it difficult to ascertain what went where and how, according to the New York Times.

In most cases, insider trading, the use of confidential information to get an unfair advantage in the market, is the type of serious business that leads to criminal investigations and possible prosecution.

Federal prosecutors in New York have taken on an intensified interest in accounting fraud fueled by the recent financial scandals involving poor reporting with deleterious results, according to the Financial Times. While Preet Bharara, the U.S.