U.S. House panel probes audit watchdog's economic analyses [Reuters]
A U.S. House panel is probing whether the country's primary audit watchdog is doing enough to weigh the economic impact as it considers new regulations for the nation's auditors. In a January 10 letter, House Oversight Chairman Darrell Issa and committee member Patrick McHenry told the chairman of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, or PCAOB, that they fear the board is "taking insufficient action to comply with the broad consensus that economic analysis is a critical element of credible regulatory policy." The Republican lawmakers added that internal PCAOB documents they had obtained appeared to show an "institutional resistance to rigorous economic analysis." They demanded that the PCAOB hand over other records by January 24 involving internal communications on economic analysis.
As many companies kick off their annual audits this month, they are taking great pains to document how they arrive at the values they put on their books for hard-to-price assets like thinly traded securities, pension-fund assets and customer lists.
Go drinking with past presidents at the Willard [GOG/WaPo]
I'm a Grover Cleveland man, myself.
Same Name Couple, Kelly Carl Hildebrandt And Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt, Are Divorcing [HP]
After three years of marriage, famed same-name couple Kelly Carl Hildebrandt and Kelly Katrina Hildebrandt have filed for divorce, citing irreconcilable differences. “She’s a Florida girl, and I’m a Texas guy,” the male Hildebrandt told NBC 6 on Friday. “We really did come from pretty different worlds.” The pair met on Facebook in May 2008 after the female Hildebrandt searched for anyone sharing her name. She came across one person — Kelly Carl Hildebrandt — and decided to send him a message. "I just told him that I saw we had the same name and I thought it was kinda cool and that I just wanted to say hi," she said on the Today Show in July 2009 (see full video below). "It was a sentence — the whole thing. It was only one sentence."