Accounting
PCAOB local forums coming to 5 cities
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board plans to host a series of five in-person forums this year, with different members of the board visiting cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, Denver, Miami and Jersey City.
The forums will focus on auditing in the small business environment and on auditing broker-dealers. The initial forum will feature PCAOB chair Erica Williams in Chicago on May 22. Another board member, George Botic, will be hosting a forum in Los Angeles this summer, followed by forums this fall hosted by board members Kara Stein (Denver), Christina Ho (Miami) and Anthony Thompson (Jersey City). The exact dates and locations for those four forums will be announced as those events get closer.
The PCAOB plans to livestream the forums in Chicago and Jersey City over the internet and recordings of all five forums will be made available on the PCAOB’s website for those won’t be able to attend in person.
“Smaller firms play an important role in our work to protect investors,” said Williams in a statement Wednesday. “These forums allow the PCAOB to share valuable resources and information with small firms to help them improve audit quality, while giving us a chance to hear from them directly about their unique needs and challenges.”
Some firms are likely to be giving the PCAOB board members an earful about some of its recent proposals. Last week, the PCAOB
The Pennsylvania Institute of CPAs is among the groups expressing their opposition to the NOCLAR proposal. “This is one of the most important proposals that I’ve seen come out from standard-setters in my career,” said Allison Henry Allison Henry, PICPA’s vice president of professional and technical standards. “I think it highlights a significant issue that we have in terms of the expectation gap and the differences of perspective from what investors think that we provide in terms of assurance and what we actually are capable of providing.”
PICPA and other accounting organizations are concerned about the scope and the pervasiveness of what is actually being asked for by the PCAOB with the NOCLAR proposal. “When we work, for example, with attorneys, and in many cases, the legal profession, people expect that they are going to use conditional language, and they’re not going to give definitive answers in terms of what’s going to happen in the future,” said Henry. “But then they turn to the auditors, and it’s almost like they want absolute certainty, and absolute assurance, relative to what the opinion is driving at without any limitations whatsoever. And I get the sense from what is being proposed that they want that absolute assurance. They’re looking at what the investors want, and what is being proposed is impossible in terms of the scope.”
She explained her views in a
The PCAOB is likely to be hearing from auditors at those forums about such proposals. The forums are tailored to PCAOB-registered firms that audit smaller public companies or broker-dealers, giving firms the chance to interact directly with representatives from the PCAOB as well as other regulators in an educational setting. The PCAOB has held similar forms since 2004, and Thompson hosted them virtually in 2022 and 2023. This year marks the first time the forums will be held in person since 2019, as many such events went virtual due to the pandemic.
Participants at this year’s forums will receive a refresher on various auditing requirements as well as learn about new requirements that will become applicable in the near future. In addition to remarks from PCAOB board members, the agenda includes the following:
- Presentations by PCAOB staff from the Office of the Chief Auditor, the Division of Registration and Inspections, and the Division of Enforcement and Investigations;
- Illustrative examples related to revenue, critical audit matters, and fraud/journal entries, among other topics; and
- Presentations by staff of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Registration is required for the
Forum attendees can submit questions in advance
Within SAP Fieldglass, Joule can recommend best-fit templates to generate job postings and statements of work with prefilled information such as the start date and the number of skilled workers needed. Joule embedded across the SAP Business Network can analyze, categorize and transform unstructured invoice rejection errors into structured, actionable insights to reduce the cost of resolving exceptions. Further planned capacities will eventually help match suppliers with new business opportunities. Within SAP Ariba, Joule will enable users to create RFPs and request help with routine inquiries and surface risks. These capabilities will also provide buying recommendations along with supplier summaries from different data sources. In addition, a sustainability scorecard from SAP Ariba helps customers make decisions that align with their organizations’ environmental, social and governance objectives.
Overall, Joule will manage 80% of the most frequently performed tasks in the SAP Ariba portfolio of intelligent spend management and business network solutions.
Krisztian Bocsi/Bloomberg
During his presentation yesterday at SAP Spend Connect Live, Manoj Swaminathan, president and chief product officer for intelligent spend and business network at SAP, noted that the company has accounted for people’s concerns regarding security and privacy.
“SAP is dedicated to delivering best-in-class solutions infused with AI, empowering you to prioritize strategic initiatives over mundane tasks,” he said during his keynote. “We understand and hear the concerns surrounding data security when implementing AI, which is why we have made no compromises in ensuring our AI capabilities set the standard for compliance. From third-party advisory boards to adhering to the
Beyond Joule’s integration into the wider portfolio of SAP products, he also announced the upcoming release of the SAP Ariba Intake Management solution, designed to address how businesses handle employee requests and process orchestration, starting with procurement. It provides employees with a single place to go for procurement inquiries and visibility on their status. The solution collects employee requests, orchestrates processes across landscapes and applications, and provides visibility on status while shielding employees from process complexity. SAP plans to make SAP Ariba Intake Management available in the first quarter of 2025.
Swaminathan also announced that SAP Business Network will launch a new promote subscription in the first quarter with value-added features to help suppliers differentiate themselves, attract new buyers and grow their businesses. Swaminathan said the subscription will give suppliers recommendations to improve discoverability, advanced search results, supplier profile verification and network catalog APIs. With the help of generative AI tools, suppliers can load their full suite of offerings into the network catalog faster and with enhanced product descriptions and summaries. The new promote subscription will help suppliers identify sales opportunities based on regional search data and use advanced insights to track business growth on the network.
He also announced a new analytics add-on with AI capabilities for SAP Fieldglass solutions, which helps procurement, vendor management and HR professionals to implement agile multichannel talent strategies. The analytics add-on for SAP Fieldglass solutions lets users review performance against over 50 external workforce key performance indicators; access global market intelligence including rates, talent supply and demand, and time-to-hire trends; and track sustainability initiatives such as spend with diverse suppliers and worker health and safety, while observing cost overruns, worker fatigue, and on- and offboarding compliance.
“With SAP Business AI as the foundation of our intelligent products, customers can improve productivity and gain insights from their spend data no matter where it sits,” said Swaminathan. “Whether it is managing cost, mitigating risk or supporting scope three emission reduction, SAP empowers companies with the right solutions for agile and effective spend management and supply chain functions.”
The Internal Revenue Service says it has processing underway on some 400,000 claims for the Employee Retention Credit, representing about $10 billion of eligible claims.
Work on the claims for small businesses and others is ongoing as the agency continues to wade through claims from the complex — and at times misused — pandemic-era credit. A significant number of the ERC claims came in during what the IRS calls “a period of aggressive marketing” by promoters, leading to a large percentage of improper, ineligible claims.
“In recent weeks, the IRS has made substantial progress in separating eligible claims from the wave of ineligible claims that have come in,” said IRS Commissioner Danny Werfel in a statement, “and we continue working to refine our models to identify more eligible claims.”
The claims being processed include eligible and ineligible claims, with most being processed for approval. Checks are being mailed for eligible claims with refunds.
The ERC program increasingly became the target of aggressive marketing well after the pandemic ended. Some promoter groups called the credit by another name, such as a grant, business stimulus payment, government relief or other names. The IRS is continuing to work denials of improper claims, intensifying audits and investigating potential fraud and abuse.
Last month, the agency opened a
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