Federal

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.

CPA Blog readers might remember that on Jan. 11, we reported that the IRS said technology improvements would allow it to issue refunds to some taxpayers in as few as 10 days, if they e-file and select direct deposit.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the last remaining member of the president’s original economic team, said that if Obama is re-elected this year it is unlikely that he will remain in the White House, according to Bloomberg.

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 Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee's first meeting of the year begins today and it's expected to turn its attention back to the nation's slow economy and disclose more details about a plan to keep interest rates low through mid-2

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.

The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness on Tuesday made a number of recommendations for jolting the nation’s jobs that, among other things, proposes that the statutory corporate tax rate be lowered to rates of what it called international competitiveness, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The U.S. Senate has entered the debate over whether there should be a separate standards setting body to oversee Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) with modifications and exceptions for private companies, with a letter signed by Sen. Carl Levin, (D-Mich.) coming out squarely against the idea.

Roads and bridges hit by various natural disasters last year are getting repairs courtesy of the federal government. In a Jan. 9 press release, the Department of Transportation announced nearly $1.6 billion in funding.

Everyone is familiar with the standard phrase in SEC enforcement language: a defendant was allow to neither "admit nor deny" wrongdoing. But a recent statement from SEC Enforcement Director Robert Khuzami says "we modified our settlement language for cases involving criminal convictions where a defendant has admitted violations of the criminal law…" Eliminated is language "that may be construed as inconsistent with admissions or findings that have already been made in the criminal cases."