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ARTICLE · 29 JANUARY 2014

2013 Financial Reporting + Accounting Enforcement Annual Review

Morrison Foerster
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If the public statements of the SEC Commissioners and staff are to be believed, brace yourself for the coming wave of financial reporting and accounting enforcement matters.

United StatesAccounting and Audit

Introduction

If the public statements of the SEC Commissioners and staff are to be believed, brace yourself for the coming wave of financial reporting and accounting enforcement matters. The SEC has sent the message loud and clear in 2013: "The SEC is back and better than ever — and that certainly is the case when it comes to pursuing financial reporting and accounting fraud."1

The SEC's emphasis on financial reporting is not unique, of course; pursuing such matters has long been one of the Commission's core focus areas. Yet in recent years — after the extensive activity in the early 2000s and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, and a brief resurgence with stock option backdating — news about financial reporting and accounting matters took a back seat to cases concerning the Financial Crisis of 2008, insider trading, FCPA-related matters, and Ponzi schemes of all types. The numbers confirm this: The SEC filed 79 financial reporting cases in 2012, compared to 219 in 2007.2 And

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