Law Commons^™

The Proof Is In The Data: How Ethereum And Efficient Audits Can Reduce Litigation In The Streaming Era, Keri Ogden

Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review

No abstract provided.

Third-Party Responsible Gambling Accreditation Programs Are Related To Short-Term Improvements At Casinos But No Ongoing Gains: Evidence From Rg Check, Kahlil S. Philander

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

This study examines how casino operators’ responsible gambling program performance changes after entering a third-party assurance program. Using de-identified responsible gambling accreditation data from the 75 casinos employing the “RG Check” program from 2012 to April 2019, this study finds that casino scores improved in the first reaccreditation period (p < .001, d = 0.92), but failed to improve in the second reaccreditation (p < .78, d = 0.38). Much of the first reaccreditation changes appear to be a result of one-time improvement in the scores of lower performing venues. There also appears to be inconsistent improvements in tactical areas of RG …

The Alchemy Of Effective Auditor Regulation, Sarah J. Williams

Faculty Scholarly Works

The audit profession has repeatedly failed in its obligation to accurately opine on financial statements prepared by companies that trade in U.S. markets. The list of entities that have contributed to the quest for effective regulation of these auditors is long; it includes the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Congress, outside directors of public companies, and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB), a recent congressional creation. Yet, despite 50 years of effort, the formula for efficacious oversight of the audit profession remains elusive.

In 2020, then-president Donald Trump proposed to …

Mandatory Tax Penalty Insurance, Michael Abramowicz

Indiana Law Journal

In a mandatory tax penalty insurance regime, taxpayers would be required to find insurers to certify portions of their tax returns. A certifying insurer would be subject to a governmental auditing regime insurers of randomly selected filings would pay an amount equal to the inverse of the selection probability multiplied by the underpayment, or they would receive money from the government in the case of overpayment. The insurers function as private auditors with no incentive to underestimate their customers' tax liability. Such a regime will consume real resources, ultimately paid by taxpayers, and thus should not be imposed universally. But …

Creating Access To Tax Benefits: How Pro Bono Tax Professionals Can Help Low-Income Taxpayers Claim The Earned Income Tax Credit, Kate Leifeld

Maine Law Review

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is meant to help low-income, working taxpayers and their families by providing a refundable tax credit. In healthy economic times, the EITC is relied upon to pull low-income taxpayers and their children out of poverty. However, we are facing the toughest economic climate in decades. In September 2009, unemployment was reported to be at 9.7 percent. While the economic outlook has begun to show signs of improvement, the unemployment rate for February 2010 remained at 9.7 percent. Even when improvement starts, the turnaround will not be overnight. In this economic climate, the EITC becomes …

The Regulatory State In The Information Age, Julie E. Cohen

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This Article examines the regulatory state through the lens of evolving political economy, arguing that a significant reconstruction is now underway. The ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one has created existential challenges for regulatory models and constructs developed in the context of the industrial economy. Contemporary contests over the substance of regulatory mandates and the shape of regulatory institutions are most usefully understood as moves within a larger struggle to chart a new direction for the regulatory state in the era of informational capitalism. A regulatory state optimized for the information economy must develop …

Reforming Healthcare Reform, Jacqueline Fox

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

'Radical Academia: Beyond The Audit Culture Treadmill' By Rowan Cahill And Terry Irving, Rowan Cahill, Terence H. Irving

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

“Marxist scholarship, already on the defensive for political reasons inside university economics faculties, often retreated into scholastic debates over texts or into abstruse mathematical calculations as remote from the real world as those of their mainstream colleagues.” So wrote Chris Harman in Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (Bookmarks Publications, 2009). It was not just in economics that the radicals retreated; it happened in all the social sciences and humanities. And not just because of political timidity; they had been outflanked. Knowledge production had changed in ways that disadvantaged radicals.

Slides: “Human Sustainability” In Natural Resources Industries: The New Frontier In Compliance, Social Responsibility, Disclosure, And Transparency, T. Markus Funk

Natural Resource Industries and the Sustainability Challenge (Martz Winter Symposium, February 27-28)

Presenter: T. Markus Funk, Partner, Perkins Coie

21 slides

“Audit The Fed” From An Austrian Perspective: Financial Reform Through An Unholy Coalition Of Unwitting Misesians, Jared L. Hausmann

Saint Louis University Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

This issue brief is intended for town officials who want to understand how development regulations in their community affect local water resources. Municipal development codes – the set of regulations that control the built environment – can have a great influence on the availability of clean and healthy water for drinking, recreation, and commercial uses. This in turn affects the community’s social, environmental, and economic vitality.

Comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and building standards are just a few examples of regulations that intentionally or unintentionally regulate the way water is transported, collected and absorbed. Regulations that produce dispersed development or large …

Combating Health Care Fraud With Audits And Education, Thomas B. Noonan

Thomas B Noonan

Fraud disrupts any and all operations in which it plagues. The disruptions manifest financially in increased costs and waste, and also by impairing trust and honesty that should base transactions within a system. Health care fraud acts like any other fraud in these regards, but it can be resisted like any other fraud. The financial world relies on audits to ensure that corporate financial statements accurately reflect what they intend to illustrate. Auditing a health care provider’s control activities would reveal whether the providers have reliable control activities to prevent and detect fraud. In addition, any policy to audit health …

Misguided Relief: The Real Property Tax Addition To The Standard Deduction, Alan L. Feld

Faculty Scholarship

The push to use federal money for benevolent purposes occasionally produces more cost than benefit, particularly when the outlay comes in the form of taxes forgiven. The Housing Assistance Tax Act of 2008 added a supplement to the basic standard deduction. A nonitemizing taxpayer may claim a deduction for real property taxes paid, up to $500, $1,000 in the case of a joint return. Initially, the change applied only to 2008, but subsequent legislation extended its life through 2009, and pending legislation would make it a permanent part of the Code. Although well intentioned, the real property tax provision makes …

Securitizing Audit Failure Risk: An Alternative To Caps On Damages, Lawrence A. Cunningham

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

For several decades, policy analysts have debated whether to establish ex ante caps on damages that audit firms face for violating state or federal law in their audits of public companies. A common argument supporting caps is a claimed inability of audit firms to obtain requisite external liability insurance and need to resort to self-insurance programs. This Article evaluates this claim by assessing existing insurance resources and inquiring into potential additional insurance devices. The assessment suggests that, for auditors, self-insurance is better than external insurance so that the claim does not necessarily support damages caps. Even if the claim were …

Alphaco: A Teaching Case On Information Technology Audit And Security, Hüseyin Tanriverdi, Joshua Bertsch, Jonathan Harrison, Po-Ling Hsiao, Ketan S. Mesuria, David Hendrawirawan

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

Recent regulations in the United States (U.S.) such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 require top management of a public firm to provide reasonable assurance that they institute internal controls that minimize risks over the firm’s operations and financial reporting. External auditors are required to attest to the management’s assertions over the effectiveness of those internal controls. As firms rely more on information technology (IT) in conducting business, they also become more vulnerable to IT related risks. IT is critical for initiating, recording, processing, summarizing and reporting accurate financial and non-financial data. Thus, understanding IT related risks and instituting internal …

Self-Regulation For Safety And Security: Final Minutes Or Finest Hour?, Douglas C. Michael

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the accounting and auditing crisis later caused by the Enron and Worldcom scandals of that same year, created a great sense of insecurity in many Americans. In this Article, I analyze the federal government's response to crisis. I first define what a crisis is: a sudden, existential threat to which the entity has insufficient resources to respond. I then explain how regulation for safety and security is unique in two aspects: perceptions matter, and the assistance of the regulated entities is essential. I proceed by describing and analyzing the regulatory history and …

Corporate Governance Changes In The Wake Of The Sarbanes-Oxley Act: A Morality Tale For Policymakers Too, Robert Charles Clark

Georgia State University Law Review

No abstract provided.

Legislating Morality: The Duty To The Tax System Reconsidered, Watson

Scholarly Works

Four years ago, I presented a paper at a symposium on professionalism jointly sponsored by the University of Kansas Law School and the Kansas Bar Association. That paper espoused the view (contrary to what appears to be the popular view among tax scholars) that tax lawyers owe no special duty to the "tax system" other than to abide by the law and the applicable standards of professional conduct. During the four-year interim since my last visit to Kansas, however, we have witnessed the deleterious effect of the IRS Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998 (RRA '98) on IRS enforcement and …

Standing Up To Wall Street (And Congress), Richard W. Painter

Michigan Law Review

In 1992, Arthur Levitt co-chaired a fundraising dinner for William Clinton. The dinner raised $750,000 (p. 7). Clinton was elected President, and Levitt got the job he wanted: Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Levitt, a former Chairman of the American Stock Exchange and a connected Democrat, was well qualified for the job. His, however, became a pyrrhic victory when accountants, issuers, broker-dealers, and other special interests used their own political connections to frustrate just about everything he sought to do. Levitt tells the story of his struggle against these well-funded interests in Take on the Street. One of …

A Tangled Web: Compliance Director Liability Under The Securities Laws, Anthony Pirraglia

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Accountants' Accountability To Nonclients In Texas., Jessica P. Gomez

St. Mary's Law Journal

This Comment proposes that accountants be held liable to any foreseeable user of their work product to ensure the deterrence of negligence on their part. Currently, the three main common law theories concerning whether nonclients can sue accountants for negligence are: (1) the privity rule; (2) the Restatement (Second) of Torts § 552; and (3) the foreseeability standard. Many states follow the Restatement approach entitled “Information Negligently Supplied for the Guidance of Others.” Texas imposes liability on accountants but fails to extend protections to third parties who rely upon the accuracy of financial statements. Further, Texas liability does not expose …

Costs Paid With Other People's Money - Inaugural Address, A.A. Sommer, Jr. Annual Lecture In Corporate, Securities & Financial Law, Arthur Levitt

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

No abstract provided.

Tax Lawyers, Ethical Obligations, And The Duty To The System, Watson

Scholarly Works

Perhaps the most elusive area of law is that of legal ethics. While the term itself is easy to define,' the subject all but defies codification because ethics, or morals (the terms are interchangeable), cannot be encapsulated by or in law. This is because law, in general, contains its own standard of validity on which there is usually clear societal consensus. For example, murder, rape, and theft are morally repugnant universally. Hence, punishment for any of these offenses does not impinge upon religious or individual autonomy because there is no ethical freedom to choose whether or not to engage in …

Cyberlaundering: The Risks, The Responses, Sarah N. Welling, Andy G. Rickman

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

This Article discusses the potential use of electronic cash for money laundering and possible government responses to the problem. Parts I and II provide an overview of electronic cash. Part III explores the effects that electronic cash can have on money laundering. Part IV explains through a series of hypotheticals how "cyberlaundering" can occur. Part V analyzes the federal government's response to the threat of money laundering with electronic cash. Part VI concludes the Article with suggestions.

The Use Of Audited Self-Regulation As A Regulatory Technique, Douglas C. Michael

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

At first blush, "self-regulation" seems to be self-contradicting. If government regulation of an industry or problem is considered necessary, how can that responsibility then be returned to those from whom it was taken? Notwithstanding this apparent contradiction, audited self-regulation is used successfully by federal regulatory agencies. It is apparently adopted, however, on an ad hoc basis: in one industry or application but not in another that possesses similar characteristics. This article reviews these previously uncollected efforts at audited self-regulation to evaluate the general usefulness of this regulatory technique across industries and applications. These insights would be relevant not only to …

Strategic Management Of Intangible Assets – A Manager’S Overview, Edward E. Frankel, William J. Murphy, Iii, R. Drew Ogden

Fordham Intellectual Property, Media and Entertainment Law Journal

No abstract provided.

Accountants' Liability For Negligence--A Contemporary Approach For A Modern Profession, Judah Septimus

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Accountants' Liability For Negligence--A Contemporary Approach For A Modern Profession, Judah Septimus

Fordham Law Review

No abstract provided.

Sendak Hits Acts Of Profs, Bar, Byron C. Wells

Douglass Boshkoff (1971-1972 Acting; 1972-1975)

No abstract provided.

The Investigatory Powers Of The Comptroller General Of The United States, Gustave M. Hauser

Michigan Law Review

This article examines the statutory responsibility and authority of the Comptroller General to investigate executive action for the purpose of determining whether the legitimacy of his requests for information may be challenged by the executive branch on statutory as well as on constitutional grounds.