Accounting/Consulting

Consulting firm McKinsey & Co. is shutting down its corporate-restructuring practice after numerous lawsuits and government investigations concerning the division’s work advising troubled borrowers, people familiar with the matter said. McKinsey has announced internally that its restructuring division would close, the people said. The consulting firm laid off some partners in its restructuring unit, called McKinsey RTS, while others are being absorbed into other practices, they said.…

Sales of rental apartment buildings are falling at the fastest rate since the subprime-mortgage crisis, a sign that higher interest rates, regional banking turmoil and slowing rent growth are undercutting demand for these buildings.Investors purchased $14 billion of apartment buildings in the first quarter of 2023, according to a preliminary report by data firm CoStar Group. That represents a 74% decline in sales from the same quarter a year earlier and would be the largest annual sales decline for any quarter going back…

April 3, 2023 9:16 am ET Germany’s audit watchdog said Ernst & Young breached its professional duty in giving Wirecard a clean bill of health from 2016 through 2018. Germany’s EY arm was fined 500,000 euros, equivalent to around $542,000. Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8…

The unexpected revolt that has upended the planned breakup of accounting firm Ernst & Young is being driven by two longtime U.S. auditors who believe their part of the firm could end up weakened by a deal.John King and Frank Mahoney, senior U.S. EY executives, have emerged as key opponents to the firm’s plan for a worldwide split of its auditing and consulting arms, according to people familiar with the matter.  After a year of planning and tens of millions of dollars in costs, the split of the 390,000-person…

The Class of 2023 is getting ready to enter a job market that is suddenly less eager to hire new grads.Many employers are taking a go-slow approach to employing graduating seniors this year, college career offices say. The cautiousness marks a sharp reversal from the past two years, when companies often made offers barely weeks after school began and staged bidding wars over interns and graduating seniors.  Some of the companies that have laid off thousands of workers in recent months—including…

The salaries offered to U.S. accountants and auditors last year climbed at their quickest pace in recent years, but industry observers say increasing pay alone may not be enough to remedy a national shortage of accountants.Fewer people are pursuing degrees in accounting and starting new jobs in this area, resulting in more open positions for related roles and searches that take longer to complete. Accounting and auditing jobs have been long viewed by people in the profession as underpaid, undervalued and less dynamic than…

The fate of Ernst & Young’s proposed split may be determined in Silicon Valley this week when feuding executives meet to hash out a deal that is acceptable to all factions. One of those powerful factions won’t be represented at the meeting and doesn’t even work for the global auditing firm. Yet some of EY’s retired partners are playing a key role in trying to block the deal.  EY this month paused its preparations for the multibillion-dollar breakup, after its U.S. arm demanded a blueprint for the deal be reworked to…

A Hertz car-rental operation at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Photo: ANDREW KELLY/REUTERS…

HONG KONG—Chinese authorities have arrested an employee of Japanese drugmaker Astellas Pharma Inc., ALPMY 0.38% the second detention of foreign company staff to have surfaced in recent days and when Beijing is seeking to reassure the business community of its commitment to an open policy. China informed the Japanese Embassy that one of its nationals, a man in his 50s, had been detained in Beijing, Japan’s chief spokesman…

Manipulation of earnings from Corporate America is on the rise, an ominous omen for the U.S. economy.That is the conclusion of new research on accounting fraud, using a technique that flagged Enron as an earnings manipulator several years before the energy company’s spectacular 2001 implosion. Unless you study accounting, you have likely never come across the M-Score, which is the number underlying both the Enron episode and the economywide concern now. The “M” is for manipulation, and uses a company’s financial…