Professor Elam
Accounting & Investing Info for San Antonio A & M
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Category: Audit
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Tuesday February 1 2011 I posed the question in class, what is a material number if you are auditing Valero? Click there to see the last three year income statements for VLO. Note that in 2008 Gross Revenue from all sources was $119 Billion! I asked you if one million would be a material number for that…
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Thursday Jan 27 2011 You really need to think like Lady Gaga, or the Beatles or any other star that creates their own software. That software can be bought many many times but only had to be created once. By contrast when a carpenter or accountant performs a job for one entity they only get paid once…
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Saturday Sept 11, 2010 Bexar Met the county water company, falsified its earnings according to the external audit report. My reading of this article is that the write got the debt service ratio reversed but the point is that Bexar Met is now in violation of its requirements to cover debt service. This is a…
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Wednesday July 28, 2010 Wiliam Burrus, Education Contact for San Antonio IIA, spoke to our classes July 27. He discussed his experiences as an internal auditor as well as the IIA certification process. He stayed with us for our discussion of leasing, turns out his hospital leases doctors! Thanks for visiting with us Mr. Burrus!
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Tuesday July 27, 2010 It is fitting that we will have a speaker on internal audit in our classes today. I spied this on Yahoo, it seems the US cannot account for some $9.1 B in Iraq oil revenue. Well make that 95% of $9.1 B. The usual bugaboo, shoddy record keeping between those paragons of…
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Tuesday June 29, 2010 Audits are not just about financial results. Managerial accounting and internal audit are all about benchmarking best practices. Here is an example from a report by City of Austin Internal Auditors. The City outsourced cemetery maintenance to a third party. But a City Council member wanted a report on the poor…
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Sunday May 21 2010 The Express News updated this April story about the City Manager of Windcrest. Cutting to the chase, the City Manager has funneled money donated by Rackspace to his brother, a 'developer' with all sorts of business related problems. I could not link to the article in today's Express News, a recurring…
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Sunday May 2, 2010 A report by three CPAs suggests that the City of Houston is broke and probably needs to take Bankruptcy. Interestingly Bill White, the past mayor of Houston is running for governor, we report, you decide.
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April 21 2010 Audit fees zoomed after SARBOX passed, no longer. Now fee competition is back. I was surprised to read this CFO article that a firm was considering switching a second year after the first switch just to see if they could get yet a lower audit fee. So much for client loyalty, now…
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Friday April 2 2010 Here is a link to the latest TSCPA web news. It features a discussion of the Lehman findings by the BK trustee as well as EY's response, guess what they contend are innocent… As I said, mood is too positive at this point for a protracted battle, and trying to put…
Professor Elam 