Accountability

After rejecting a plea deal that would have let him avoid facing public trial, Representative Charles Rangel (D – NY) has been charged with 13 separate ethics violations by the House Ethics Committee, the culminatio

An audit recently conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR)has found that the Pentagon cannot account for 96 percent of the $9.1 billion it has been receiving since 2004 to rebuild the war-torn nation, a state of affairs that the report blames on poor internal controls within the Department of Defense (DoD) that left the money vulnerable to “inappropriate uses and undetected loss.”

The passage of the new Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act has given the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) an expanded role in the regulation of the nation’s financial sector, with new powers and abilities that include overseeing the creation of 95 new rulemaking procedures, more than any other federal agency.

Despite promising state workers last year that there would be no layoffs, Governor David A. Paterson stated on Monday that times have changed since then and that New York may have to cut jobs anyway, buttressing earlier statements made by state budget director Robert Megna last week on the same topic.

A recently released report from New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli shows that the majority of the contracts made by state Department of Taxation and Finance went towards banking or information technology services. Auditors examining the department’s 81 contracts for personal and miscellaneous services found that more than 98 percent of them were devoted to either banking or information technology needs. The contracts, put together, totaled about $563 million.

A House investigative panel has concluded that Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) violated a range of ethics rules, after a two-year investigation, according to the New York Times.

The investigative panel did not disclose to the Times any details about the nature of the violations that it found, but one House official who has been briefed on the findings told the paper that they included some of the most serious allegations that had been examined.

Selling some bonds and need a rating to go with them? In the past, organizations like Moody’s, Fitch and Standard and Poor’s would have said “no problem!” Now that the financial reform law has been signed into law, however, these three agencies, the biggest in the country, are telling sellers to look somewhere else, at least for the time being.

President Barack Obama signed into law today the most far reaching set of reforms to the nation’s financial infrastructure since the Great Depression.

Figures released today by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli show that the state has ended the first quarter of the fiscal year with a negative balance, something that a statement from the comptroller’s office said has only happened one other time in modern history (we’re still waiting on a call back from the comptroller’s office to let us know when the first time was).

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) is seeking comments on a proposed new standard that would overhaul the rules governing an auditor’s use of confirmations, which are direct auditor communication with a third party about a particular item affecting the company's financial statements. The proposed standard seeks to modernize and strengthen the current rules on confirmations, which Acting Chairman Daniel L.