Accounting fraud

The Securities and Exchange Commission imposed sanctions Thursday against a Florida-based CPA for performing deficient and fraudulent audits and quarterly reviews for eight publicly traded companies, and issuing false and misleading audit opinions on the companies’ annual financial statements.

The Securities and Exchange Commission filed accounting fraud charges against two former top executives of a now-bankrupt online video management company, accusing them of falsifying financial statements to make the company appear more profitable than it was in reality.

BDO USA has agreed to pay $2.1 million to settle charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission that the firm dismissed a number of red flags and issued false and misleading unqualified audit opinions about the financial statements of a staffing services company, General Employment Enterprises.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged Bankrate and three of its former executives with accounting fraud.

Certify, a company that specializes in expense management software, wants to draw attention to the problem of expense report fraud.

A California CPA has admitted to abusing his positions at a worship center in New Jersey and a nonprofit in California to steal more than $4 million.

Toshiba Corp. uncovered 10 new cases of accounting problems, including at a U.S. unit, prompting it to miss a regulator’s deadline for submission of its fiscal 2014 earnings release.

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges Thursday alleging that Miller Energy Resources Inc., its former chief financial officer, and its current chief operating officer inflated values of oil and gas properties, resulting in fraudulent financial reports for the Tennessee-based company.

The last of Bernard Madoff’s employees to be sentenced in the largest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history was ordered to serve six months in prison after pleading for mercy because of his failing health.

Plaintiffs filed 85 new federal class-action securities cases against U.S.-based companies in the first half of 2015, a decrease from the second half of last year, which saw 92 cases filed, according to a new report.

More than a dozen years ago, the U.S. experienced a rash of high-profile accounting scandals. Now it’s Japan’s turn.

The Anti-Fraud Collaboration, a joint effort of the Center for Audit Quality, Financial Executives International, the Institute of Internal Auditors and the National Association of Corporate Directors, has released the third in a series of case studies examining how to identify and stop accounting fraud in an organization.

One of the more intriguing questions stemming from the Toshiba Corp. accounting scandal is this: Where was the whistleblower?

Toshiba Corp. issued almost 1 trillion yen ($8 billion) of stocks and bonds when it was inflating earnings statements, leaving the company exposed to possible regulatory fines and investor lawsuits.

Toshiba Corp. President Hisao Tanaka and his two predecessors quit after investigators found that the Japanese conglomerate inflated earnings by at least $1.2 billion since the global financial crisis.

An accountant who helped Bernard Madoff fudge trading records to cover up fraudulent transactions in the biggest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history won’t be going to prison.

The U.K. Financial Reporting Council is investigating former employees of RSA Insurance Group Plc’s Irish unit regarding accounting irregularities in 2012.

Noble Group Ltd. appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP to review how it values some of its assets after criticism of the Asian trading company’s accounting practices.

The American Accounting Association has retracted 25 articles written or co-authored by a former accounting professor who was forced to resign after his university uncovered a “pattern of misconduct.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the offices of a Connecticut accounting firm Tuesday and seized documents in connection with a fraud complaint.