Senior European officials are frustrated at a perceived lack of transparency over the appointment of the successor to Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), who is due to step down in June 2011.

The FRC’s Board for Actuarial Standards (BAS) has today published its draft standard for work performed for funeral plan trusts. Funeral plan trusts provide security for customers’ pre-payment of funeral costs.

Traditionally, accounting rules have given companies a lot of leeway in how they record leases for assets ranging from store locations and restaurant equipment to airplanes and machinery. As a result, only certain types of leases appear on the balance sheet, while a majority of a company’s leases can often be kept off the balance sheet and hidden from an investors’ view.

America’s general tactics of financial assistance to troubled companies in 2007-2009 helped many foreign banks instead of their own governments – informed CNBC, referring to results of the research by a special commission of the Congress.

Before the end of summer commercial banks in Ukraine will have to inform the National Bank (NBU) on their plans to raise regulatory capital to required 120 million hryvnas (≈15 million USD). Smaller financial institutions, although still complaining on never-ending changers in regulation, are nonetheless planning to pump funds into their capital. If some of them fail, they will have to merge, search for investors, or leave.

The report from Korn/Ferry International and the Institute of Internal Auditors’ Audit Executive Center indicates that today’s chief audit executives need broader experience, more business acumen and other key leadership skills to be effective in this dynamic economic environment.

Freed from the threat of the Supreme Court putting it out of business, the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board has decided to start flexing its muscles. The board issued a quick succession of announcements in a single day last week, including new and stricter risk assessment standards, plans to impose more sanctions on accounting firms and managers that don’t adequately supervise their staff, and the intention to ask Congress to allow the board to make its disciplinary proceedings and hearings public.

Starting form 2014, the Ministry of Finance wants to cancel the single (uniform) tax on imputed income because the whole experience of this approach to taxation proved ineffective.

The Federal Reserve announced this Tuesday that it would reinvest $150 billion of funds from maturing bonds to additionally repurchase the government debt. It’s a small, but quite significant step in economic policy, but investors were surely hoping for something more significant.

The US could be stripped of any influence over global financial rules if it does not adopt them itself, the head of the international accounting standard setter has warned. Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), believes US influence on standard setting may diminish if it rejects international accounting rules next year.