Auditing

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.

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.

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:

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.”

Ernst & Young announced that it will appoint four non-executive directors to its global advisory board after the summer. It will be the first time an accounting firm will have a board structure similar to those governing multinational companies.

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to rule today on whether or not the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a nongovernmental regulatory body formed in response to the collapse of Enron in 2001, violates the Constitution.

The National Federation of Independent Business lobby of New York recently wrote a letter to New York Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli asking him to investigate the state’s auditing practices, which it called “overly aggressive,” “unrealistic” and “unfair.”

New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli announced that audits have been issued for eight agencies in New York City and New York State combined. The Office of the State Comptroller regulary audits state agencies, public authorities and New York City agencies to ensure their programs use funds efficiently.

Lawmakers negotiating the details of the final financial regulatory reform plan have agreed to an audit of the Federal Reserve that, while not as aggressive as the version being promoted by the House, is still more comprehensive than what the