The big show for the U.S. accounting industry is the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants. They set a lot of the standards for the accounting industry and basically write the rules accountants are supposed to follow as they cook - er, keep - the books of the country's major and minor corporations.
The Auditing Standards Board is a committee within the AICPA. The organization refers to it as "senior committee for auditing, attestation, and quality control." (It is our humble opinion that "attestation" is a grossly underused word. Please use it often, as in "it is my attestation that strawberry-flavored soda is gross.")
Basically, the ASB figures out the best way to conduct a corporate audit and issues guidelines to accountants. Their existence provides a central set of rules, so that everyone follows pretty much the same procedures when they do their auditing thing.
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Finance: What are Insider Trading And th...11 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is insider trading and the securities fraud
Enforcement Act of 1988? all right well the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934
aka the 34 Act made it formally illegal to use inside information in trading
stocks amazingly that used to not be illegal or at least not explicitly so [People gambling]
and it wasn't enforced investing was well a clubby white man's insiders gig
and the boys took care of the boys well since people could make a lot of
money with insider information and thought they wouldn't get caught like [Boy peeing at a urinal]
well who's gonna know that I overheard the CEO of big company talking about a
merger in a Denny's washroom you know some folks pretty much ignored
the law well the 1988 law was basically Congress saying you guys were really [Congressman discussing the 1988 law]
serious about this so this new legislation added some hefty penalties
if you get caught as an inside trader people still trade on insider
information though and they still get caught and they go to jail and they lose [Jail door closes on man]
everything they have so he's got to realize some of us were just born to be
bad...
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