Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 130 (SFAS 130) was released in 1997 which required publicly traded companies to separately report comprehensive income in the financial statements. SFAS 130 prescribed three alternative formats for the presentation without mandating any one specific format. SFAS 130 also required certain details of comprehensive income to be displayed prominently in the financial statements. The current study examined the presentation of comprehensive income by a sample of companies traded on the NASDAQ market to determine the predominant method of presentation among these companies, five years after SFAS 130 became effective. Results of the examination of one hundred annual reports showed that a majority of the sampled companies used the third approach, which was to present comprehensive income as part of the Statement of Stockholders’ Equity, as against the first two approaches that favored presentation of comprehensive income on the face of the Income Statement or in a separate statement. Further, the paper also discusses some ancillary findings pertaining to the presentation of the details of comprehensive income.

This study takes a look at the rise in the total auditor compensation that has taken place over the past several years after the passage of Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). Prior research, with the exception of a few studies, has mostly focused on the possible harmful effects of non-audit service fees on the auditor ' s independence. The results of those studies have been mixed, with more studies concluding that non-audit service fees threaten auditor independence. In response to such fi ndings, the government has passed legislation (SOX) banning companies from purchasing certain non-audit services from their audit fi rms with a view to reducing the economic ties between a client and its auditor. However, the published data from a sample of companies show that while the amounts of non-audit fees received by audit fi rms have declined over the last several years, the overall auditor compensation has increased during the same period, even signifi cantly in several cases. In most cases, the rise in the total auditor compensation has been caused by a signifi cant rise in the audit fees paid by a company to its audit fi rm. The current study examines this rise in the total compensation paid by a sample of companies that are the audit clients of the Big Four CPA fi rms and fi nds that SOX has not really succeeded in reducing the economic bonding between a company and its auditor. Moreover, as total auditor compensation indicates a fl ow of money from clients to auditors, regardless of the service for which the money is being paid, the authors suggest that studies involving the issue of auditor compensation and its potential impact on auditor independence should focus primarily on the total auditor compensation and not just a segment of it such as non-audit service fees.

<p class="MsoBodyTextIndent" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 0in; margin: 0in 34.2pt 0pt 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: x-small;">The years 2001-02 were marked with an outburst of huge corporate financial failures that eroded billions of dollars from the stockholders&rsquo; equity and shook the confidence of the investor community. One of the issues that rose to the surface was the payment of huge nonaudit service fees by publicly traded companies to their auditors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>In response to the outcry against the alleged role of the auditors in the corporate scandals, Congress passed Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX), which imposed a prohibition on the supply of certain nonaudit services by a CPA firm to its audit clients in order to reduce the suspected<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>revenue-dependence of auditors on their audit clients.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The study described in this paper examines the pattern of auditor compensation in the years 2001 and 2004 (i.e., pre- and post-SOX periods), for a sample of large public companies, to determine how the auditor compensation has changed during this three-year period and whether the new regulations have decreased such revenue-dependence of the auditor. The study also examines if each of the Big 4 CPA firms that dominate the audit market for large public companies have experienced a change in the pattern of their revenues drawn from different sources of auditor compensation. The results show that not only the composition of auditor compensation has changed after the passage of SOX but also the overall compensation paid by the sampled companies to their auditors has gone up noticeably in many cases, primarily due to a phenomenal rise in audit fees, which still may continue to threaten the auditor&rsquo;s independence in the audit process.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Further, during this three-year period, each of the Big 4 CPA firms has shifted its emphasis on the different sources of its revenues from these large public companies.</span></p>

The research described in this paper examined sustainability reports and/or disclosures voluntarily published by some of the larger companies in the US for the year 2014. The term sustainability was considered interchangeable with corporate social responsibility in accordance with several of the past academic studies and the approach taken by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI). Data collected from the stand-alone reports or the website-based disclosures for the top 100 S&P 500®companies showed that, while the number of companies that published such information had grown over the years, there was both considerable variation in the format and volume of the information published, and variety in the sustainability initiatives pursued by different companies.The study showed a need to bring comparability in the published data. Also, companies that published the data should use independent, external assurance services to enhance the credibility of such data, which happened only for less than half of the sample.