News Digest for November 10, 2006

There are 5 items… Too Many Regulators For Wall Street? | IBM accelerates push into 3D virtual worlds |Be Prepared for the SEC’s New Executive Compensation Disclosure Requirements|Accounting Oversight: Backing Down? | The Case of the Missing Analysts

Too Many Regulators For Wall Street?
Are there too many securities industry regulators for a sector that seems to be shrinking by the minute?

IBM accelerates push into 3D virtual worlds
Chairman and Chief Executive Sam Palmisano is set to visit Second Life on Tuesday, following a “town hall” meeting with some 7,000 employees in China, and speak with the more than 250 IBM employees on one of the company’s virtual islands.

Be Prepared for the SEC’s New Executive Compensation Disclosure Requirements
Perhaps the most important consideration to keep in mind in drafting executive compensation disclosure is the additional public exposure to certain types of compensation information and compensation decisions that were not previously disclosed.

Accounting Oversight: Backing Down?
The accounting oversight board “has backpedaled yet once again to permit an audit firm to do the income tax work for executives of the companies they audit for another year,” says Lynn Turner, former chief accountant at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. “Unfortunately, these types of engagements are almost never disclosed to investors.”

The Case of the Missing Analysts
A paper by a group of business professors reported that the widely used I/B/E/S historical database of stock-analyst recommendations contains nearly 20,000 “changes of an unusual nature,” including “selective removal of analyst names from historic recommendations.”

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