Month: June 2003

This report–“Did Pension Plan Accounting Contribute to a Stock Market Bubble?“–by Julia Coronado and Steven Sharp, both with the Federal Reserve Board, can now be found online. The report was mentioned in an article at AccountingToday.com— “GAAP for pensions: Sanctioned fraud must go” and discussed here in a previous post.

The SEC has issued SEC Release 33-8238, its final rules regarding “Management’s Reports on Internal Control Over Financial Reporting and Certification of Disclosure in Exchange Act Periodic Reports.” The SEC states the following regarding the Form 11-k 906 Certification requirement which has been discussed in previous posts:

“In light of these developments, we are considering, in consultation with the Department of Justice, the application of Section 906 to current reports on Forms 6-K and 8-K and annual reports on Form 11-K and the possibility of taking additional action.”

In other words, the SEC is deferring on the issue until a later date.

The Release is discussed here at CorpLawBlog.

If you have a little time, there is this amazing advertisement for the Honda Accord which you can access here. By the way, these cars have the same feature that created “rain” in Ernie’s car as discussed here. Glad to know about the potential drawback of this feature because we own cars that have this feature.

Also, you can access the United Health Foundation‘s 2002 rankings for the healthiest states to live in here. Rankings are based on crime, public health care, and other factors. Pennsylvania is ranked #23, Utah #4, Missouri #32, and Oklahoma #46. The least healthiest is Louisiana, according to the report.

Today’s Federal Register is here.

PlanSponsor.com has this article: “IRS Strips Down Complex Voluntary Compliance Rules.” The article discusses new Rev. Proc. 2003-44, posted here yesterday, and states that one of the major changes to EPCRS made by the Rev. Proc. is the fee schedule.

The International Foundation of Employee Benefit Plans has this article: “New proponents of overhaul for healthcare: CEOs.”

CFO.com reports here on stock option expensing and pension funding. Then there’s this article for the Chicago Sun Times at Suntimes.com–“State awfully creative in balancing the budget”–which discusses how the state with the greatest unfunded pension liability took care of the problem, at least for this year.

The Heritage Foundation has published an interesting summary of an economic impact analysis of the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 performed by economists at the Center for Data Analysis (CDA). CDA introduced the tax policy changes contained in the Act into a model of the U.S. economy that is widely used by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies and then produced estimates of how the bill would likely affect economic performance between 2003 and 2013.

The article that has been posted here as an explanation of “What is a blog?” has now been published by the The Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association. The article– “Blogs, Bloggers and Blawgs”–originally appeared in the Oklahoma Bar Journal. The article was written by Jim Calloway, an attorney from Oklahoma, who serves as the director of the Oklahoma Bar Association Management Assistance Program. Jim does an excellent job of keeping the Oklahoma Bar abreast of all the latest “techie” developments and his articles in the Oklahoma Bar Journal are always some of my most favorites.

This article for Reuters at Yahoo! News reports: “Senate Passes Child Tax Credit Refund Bill.” The bill would ensure that low-income families benefit from an increase in the child tax credit that was part of Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act.

Perkins & Coie has this article discussing the SEC’s stance on the 906 Certification requirement for SEC Form 11-K. The article points out that the SEC and the Department of Justice are leaning towards a conclusion that Form 11-K is covered by the 906 Certification requirement. The article also discusses who should make the certification. Finally, there is this discussion thread at Benefitslink on the issue. The issue has been discussed in prior posts which can now be viewed under this topic–Securities Requirements: Form 11-k 906 Cert.

The Volokh Conspiracy has posted some interesting thoughts on how bloggers may in the future begin to wield “considerable influence” in the legal academic community.