It’s another case of curious timing.
Two months ago, I wrote a post about how the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ annual Not-for-Profit conference seems to be the Office of Management and Budget’s unofficial deadline for issuing the annual revision of the Circular A-133 Compliance Supplement. And as I mentioned in a post earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office said that this Friday, it plans to issue an interim version of the 2011 revised Government Auditing Standards (aka the “Yellow Book”). Again, what’s looming on the schedule? Yep, an AICPA conference.
This time it’s the AICPA National Governmental Accounting and Auditing Update Conference East, one of the association’s more important gatherings of the year, to be held in Washington, D.C., early next week. Needless to say, releasing the updated Yellow Book, albeit in interim form, before this conference would give the GAO a great chance to provide details on the 2011 revision, which had been in limbo since GAO released an exposure draft in August 2010.
Seeing how the federal government has catered to the AICPA’s audience in these two cases, perhaps if the AICPA had hosted a conference in April on reaching a debt ceiling agreement, we may have been spared from suffering through this summer’s political squabbling.
I will be attending this upcoming conference to generate some informative articles for the Single Audit Information Service. If you plan to attend, look for me. I’ll be the one in the front row taking copious notes.
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One Comment
Hum … My reading of your article hints at undue influence: “pulling strings”. While I think the accounting profession has unduly complicated governement & not-for-profit accounting, they are still one of the important audiences, users and disseminators of A-133 and the “Yellow Book” information. So why not have a major gatherings of accountants and professionals discussing government and not-for-profit accounting as a deadline for getting new policies and procedures ready? I am missing the threat or negative implications here? Please explain.
Or was your intent that it is good there are outside events that keep the government deliverying on time as you referred in your remark about the debt ceiling. If so, wouldn’t “holding their feet to the fire” be a better idoiom than “pulling strings”.