Last week, President-elect Donald Trump nominated corporate attorney Jay Clayton to replace Mary Jo White as the new SEC Chairman. Jay Clayton is a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, where his practice includes public and private mergers and acquisitions, capital markets offerings, … Continue reading
Author Archives: Mercedes Erickson
A Look at Non-GAAP Reporting after New SEC Guidance
Audit Analytics released our latest report, Corporate Implementation of SEC’s Compliance & Disclosure Interpretations Regarding Non-GAAP Financial Measures, at this year’s annual AICPA conference on current SEC and PCAOB developments, held in Washington, D.C. We previously found that 449 of S&P 500 companies (88%) presented at … Continue reading
Warning Signs Leading to Securities Litigation
Over the past 10 years, major drivers behind securities litigation were either financial restatements and misrepresentations or significant corporate events (such as IPOs and M&A activity). Material restatements are very likely to trigger a legal action. Yet, the key question that … Continue reading
The Importance of Director and Officer Changes
Earlier this year we explored departure statistics regarding general counsel and chief legal officers. In this blog, we provide an update for this year’s departures involving all director and officer positions. So far, there have been over 8,400 records filed during 2016 with the … Continue reading
Literature Review: “Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Reporting Errors Deemed Immaterial by Managers”
In this post, we look at a recent paper titled “Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Reporting Errors Deemed Immaterial by Managers” by Preeti Choudhary, Kenneth Merkley, and Katherine Schipper. The authors use Audit Analytics’ databases on restatements and immaterial error corrections to provide an in-depth analysis of the … Continue reading
Audit Fees and Non-Audit Fees: A Fourteen Year Trend
Last week, Audit Analytics released its annual report Audit Fees and Non-Audit Fees: A Fourteen Year Trend. The report provides a detailed breakdown of fees paid by accelerated filers and includes an additional analysis of companies that filed an auditor attestation that disclosed ineffective … Continue reading
Comment Letters with No Response
What happens when a company doesn’t return or fully comply with an SEC comment letter? Receiving a comment letter from the SEC might cause a CFO to suffer some heartburn, but usually the process is no cause for undue concern. Under … Continue reading