Accounting

General Motors Corp. escaped from a federal accounting probe without penalty Thursday when the automaker settled Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that GM's mistakes violated federal laws. The Detroit automaker will not be fined and did not admit or deny wrongdoing.

U.S. District Court Judge Manuel L. Real, who has endured a rare public censure by the federal judiciary, the threat of impeachment and removal from several cases for questionable conduct, now faces demands to account for $5 million or more in apparently missing trust funds. Lawyers for rival Filipino groups laying claim to the seized assets of late Philippines Dictator Ferdinand Marcos have petitioned a federal appeals court to demand that Real provide a detailed accounting of $35.

KB Home, one of the nation's largest home builders, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission "regarding possible accounting and disclosure issues." The investigation opens a fresh round of scrutiny of the company. Its former chief executive, Bruce Karatz, is awaiting trial on federal charges he fraudulently manipulated stock options. In 2006, Karatz resigned after an internal investigation found he had backdated his own stock option grants to increase his pay. In 2008, Karatz agreed to pay more than $7 million to settle SEC charges but didn't admit wrongdoing.

The Bush administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission are pressing forward with a plan that would allow American companies to opt out of using U.S. accounting standards in favor of international ones as a way to ease global business dealings and help corporations raise capital around the world. But critics in Congress and elsewhere warn that the initiative threatens to let the industry unravel investor protections enacted since the Enron scandal.

The weather is balmy, the local beaches are inviting, and so, naturally, San Diego State students are thinking about . . . accounting. Yes, accounting. It's become one of the hot courses on campus. Enrollment is up, one of the accounting lecturers has twice been named professor of the year, and several dozen students spent their summer mornings in a class poring over a 3-inch-thick tome titled "Federal Taxation."

Federal regulators officially rejected a banking industry push to suspend accounting rules that force banks to value assets on their balance sheets at current market prices even if they plan to hold them for years. The Securities and Exchange Commission issued a report to Congress that recommended maintaining so-called mark-to-market rules but suggested improvements to current accounting practices.

Mills Corp., an owner of 38 U.S. shopping malls, including the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, said Tuesday that it might be forced into bankruptcy after executive misconduct and accounting errors resulted in almost four years of earnings restatements. Its shares fell 22%, the most since August. Chevy Chase, Md.-based Mills, which is seeking a buyer, will restate results for 2001 to 2004 and for the first three quarters of 2005 and expects the errors to cost as much as $354 million.

California and 29 other states have taken the side of Enron Corp. shareholders seeking damages from big investment banks in a federal case over the banks' alleged role in Enron's accounting fraud. The states' move puts them at odds with a legal stance the Securities and Exchange Commission staff had considered taking in support of one of the banks, Merrill Lynch & Co., but appears now to have decided against.

The state attorney general's office has begun scrutinizing the financial records of an Orange County charity that sponsored an all-expenses-paid trip to Disneyland last month for the families of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A spokeswoman for Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown described the action as routine when a charity fails to register with the state. The state also requested financial information from the Rotary Club foundation that co-sponsored the event.

Grossly incompetent bookkeeping that plagued the failed OnTrac rail project is making it difficult for Placentia officials to determine the financial health of the city, the new finance director for the city said Wednesday. Although Terrence Beaman said he had found no indication of accounting fraud by former or current officials, his downbeat assessment only underscored the city's difficult situation. Placentia is about $30 million in debt and faces a $2.