ANTHONY H. CATANACH JR. is an associate professor in the School of Business at Villanova University, as well as the Cary M. Maguire Fellow at the American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. His professional experience includes five years as an audit manager with KPMG and six years in the financial services industry. Dr. Catanach has received numerous awards for his publication, teaching, and curriculum innovation efforts. He has authored numerous articles on a variety of accounting, finance, and management issues, as well as several business education texts..
An entire generation has seen their dream of retirement shattered by the failure of the accounting profession. CPAs are supposed to be the “watchdogs” and “gatekeepers” that make sure company financial statements are what they say they are. Instead, the past 15 years have dealt us a “dot-com” crisis, the 2002 financial reporting frauds (with [...]
Aug 042011
A curious article made the first page of the Wall Street Journal last Thursday. Shayndi Raice and Nick Wingfield wrote that a non-GAAP measure employed in Groupon’s S-1 has attracted the attention of the SEC (“Groupon’s Accounting Lingo Gets Scrutiny”). We wonder why.
Washington debates over the debt ceiling remind us why we haven’t considered careers in politics—we aren’t that irrational or narcissistic. We actually do care for the public welfare. As such, we offer our accounting expertise in general and our expertise specifically in budgeting to weigh in on the discussion. This is important because the unrestrained [...]
An old metaphor features a soldier who watches a raging battle from afar and, when the skirmish is over, proceeds to bayonet the wounded. Credit rating agencies are like this proverbial soldier; whatever information they proffer generally comes much too late to benefit anybody. They may send out red flags, but these signals often come [...]
Congratulations to Jonathan Weil for recently unmasking KPMG’s shoddy audit work at Alterra Capital Holdings Ltd. (ALTE) in Bermuda. Once again we are left questioning whether the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) is fulfilling its stated mission “to protect the interests of investors and further the public interest” when it refuses to disclose the [...]
J. EDWARD KETZ is an associate professor of accounting in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science, a master’s degree in accountancy, and a Ph.D., all from Virginia Tech. Professor Ketz has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1981. He also has taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Maryland. Professor Ketz has authored and edited 17 books including Hidden Financial Risk (Wiley, 2003) which examines the corporate culture and the institutional setting that engendered recent accounting scandals. Dr. Ketz has been cited in the popular and business press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, and USA Today. He also has appeared as an accounting commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg Radio.