Michael Doan

Bill Sheridan, in writing about the SEC further delaying the adoption of IFRS, quotes the president of IFRS Education and Training, LLC.

You’ve got Canada, Mexico – all the major economies throughout the world are using IFRS. We will run into it somewhere down the line — and that’s if the United States doesn’t adopt it. I believe we will.

[Emphasis mine]

I present to you the following map:

Is this a map of countries that have not adopted IFRS? No.

Is this a map of countries that have not adopted the metric system? Yes.

I’m not saying that the U.S. won’t adopt IFRS, but it doesn’t appear that anyone is in a hurry.  The U.S., she’s a stubborn country.

For all of the traveling auditor/accountants out there, here’s a first world problem you can help solve: Petition the Whitehouse to allow electronic devices to remain on, in “airport mode”, during taxi, takeoff and landing.

(via Ben Brooks)

The New York Times ran a series of interesting charts that shows initial securities law violations and repeat violations of the same law by the same Wall Street firms.

For instance, one chart (see below) shows that Citibank initially violated section 17a of the 1933 Act in 2000, then it violated 17a three more times before the decade was out, and once again in 2011. It appears that the SEC investigates and settles each violation. For the Wall Street firm, it’s the cost of doing business.

The auditing/attestation industry has seen many reforms since early 2000. My biased view is that these reforms have been and continue to be out of balance in that the auditing profession is bearing much of the reform. What should be done is to look at all the players, in addition to auditors, in the process like SEC investigators (why are they settling?) and staff reviewing issuer filings, securities attorney, audit committees and board of directors, and the PCAOB inspection team. There should be accountability and adequate resources along the entire “compliance chain.”

UPDATED [9 December 2011 0900 hrs]: The charts are archived below:

1. Purposeful or negligent fraud in interstate commerce
2. Purposeful fraud by securities firm
3. Purposeful or negligent fraud by investment advisors

TextGrabber is a mobile scanner for iPhone that has optical character recognition (OCR). Using the app’s camera, take a photo of text and the app will convert it to text that can be copied, emailed, or pushed to other apps. It can even translate the text to another language.

I find myself using this app occasionally when I want to copy text from Kindle for iPhone, which does not allow text to be copied, to another app. I also sometimes use it to OCR text from a scanned PDF or photo of a document.

It’s a handy little app. Below are screenshots of TextGrabber OCRing text from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance.

A screenshot of the text from Kindle for iPhone:

 Select the text to be OCRed:

The result:

Shawn Blanc has a good review of Doxie Go, the portable scanner. And, there’s a cool video he pulled together too.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m a Fujitsu Scansnap user. I also reviewed the Scansnap.

There are not enough words to express what a bad idea this is.

3-in-1 device that serves as a wireless mouse, 10-digit calculator, and keypad.

(via 52 Tiger)

Eddie Smithhas it right on why Microsoft needs to develop Office on iPad now:

Today, few people see the iPad as a full replacement for the desktop experience—particularly for heavy productivity. I think this will change. The iPad will evolve. It will become more powerful and more capable. And cloud services will become more accessible.

A side note: as I wrote this post on my iPhone, an email came in with a Word document attached. I need to make two quick edits to the Word document. I launch QuickOfficeto make the edits but I don’t because the document is heavily formatted and I am concern that QuickOffice will break the Word formatting compatibility when I email this back to the sender.

Office for iOS would nice right about now. Instead, I’ll have to crack open the notebook computer to two edits.

Since subscribing to iTunes Match, I’ve always wondered if streaming songs from iCloud on iPhone or iPad actually downloads those songs to your device (I suspected that it does, but was too lazy to check).

In Walt Mossberg’s review of iTunes Match today, he provides the answer:

On iPhones and iPads, Apple downloads the whole of any cloud-based song you’re streaming, even if you don’t want it on your device. Apple says it does this for smooth playback, and for playback when you’re offline. It adds that all songs stored on your hand-held devices are now placed in a special cache from which old or rarely played songs are automatically removed periodically to make room for new ones.