Accounting

Andersen Worldwide, the international umbrella organization that includes auditing firm Arthur Andersen, has agreed to pay $40 million to settle lawsuits from Enron Corp. investors and employees.

NEW YORK - A New Jersey man who was a teenage store clerk when 6-year-old Etan Patz vanished 33 years ago Friday told police he lured the boy into the store with promises of a soda, strangled him, then dumped the body into an alley - a dramatic confession that could solve one of the country's most chilling missing-child mysteries. New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, speaking at a news conference Thursday night, said Pedro Hernandez, 51, of Maple Shade, N.J., had spoken to investigators for more than three hours, that his confession had been videotaped, and that Hernandez had told people over the years that he'd been involved in a horrible crime.

Kenneth Leventhal, a Los Angeles accountant who oversaw some of the largest real estate transactions in the country, died Tuesday at his Bel-Air home. He was 90 and had prostate cancer. Leventhal was a key figure in the transformation of Southern California after World War II as the region grew into a densely populated metropolis. His firm, Kenneth Leventhal & Co., guided such prominent real estate developers as Ray Watt, Trammell Crow and Donald Trump through times of expansion and financial distress.

WASHINGTON - The consumer financial watchdog is taking aim at reloadable prepaid cards, moving to regulate a fast-growing product that has become a popular alternative to checking accounts for lower-income Americans and a new source of fees for some banks. Consumer advocates have been pushing for regulation of the cards, which look like conventional credit cards or debit cards tied to bank accounts. But the prepaid cards are not required to offer the same consumer protections, such as clear disclosure of fees and caps on losses if stolen.

Dear Liz: I graduated from college last summer and was lucky enough to get full-time employment. However, I have a great deal of college debt, including private and federal loans. Are there government programs that help pay back college loan debt? Do you have any suggestions? I cringe at the thought of paying double what I owe over the life of the loan because of interest and want to get this debt under control in the next few years instead of 15. Answer: Your eagerness to pay off your student loan debt is admirable and is particularly appropriate when it comes to your private student loans.

The gig: Sharon Allen guides the strategy and overall direction of Deloitte, one of the country's big four accounting firms, in the position of board chairman ? a title she prefers to "chairwoman. " The 58-year-old executive spends 75% of the year flying around the country and the world, advising key clients and maintaining the company's visibility. With 37 years at the firm under her belt, she's a business veteran and the highest-ranking woman in the history of the big four. She also sits on the global board of directors of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

Troubled Los Angeles clothing company American Apparel disclosed Tuesday that the U.S. attorney's office in New York City is investigating its abrupt change of accounting firms. Deloitte & Touche resigned as American Apparel's accountant and was replaced by Marcum, the company recently announced. Peter Schey, an attorney for American Apparel, said the company received a subpoena seeking documents and other records "a few days ago. " The change of accountants "was definitely not anything sinister," Schey said in an interview.

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.

"Love moves me to speak," Beatrice tells Dante as she leads him through Paradise. Loathing moved the late Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard to write. He wrote with unfailing vitriolic scorn and run-on paragraphs of unalleviated length, designed, seemingly, to punish the reader along with his subjects. Yet it is an energized, kinetic loathing. Bernhard's harsh wartime childhood, forcible membership in a Nazi youth group, a stay in a tuberculosis sanatorium and disgust with the blinkered narrowness of postwar Austrian society were a darkness upon darkness that caused him to despise any use of art's light to depict it, as Kafka and Robert Musil did. Instead, in such novels as "Woodcutters" and "Gargoyles" and a memoir, "Gathering Evidence," Bernhard devised a lantern that shines black.

One in 10 publicly traded companies made financial restatements because of accounting irregularities in the last five years, the U.S. General Accounting Office said Wednesday. Annual restatements from accounting irregularities will increase 170% to a projected 250 by the end of 2002 from 92 in 1997, the report says.

The newspapers and websites were full Monday morning with stories about Sunday's eclipse: finely done accounts with facts, figures, quotations and on-the-scene reporting. Will any win the Pulitzer Prize? Only time will tell. But if so, there is precedent: The 1924 Pulitzer Prize for reporting went to Magner White, a reporter for the San Diego Sun, for his account of a noontime solar eclipse that occurred Sept. 10, 1923. White's account, in the lean, vivid prose of the day, had weird gusts of wind hitting the city, circus animals pacing and roaring, prostitutes falling to their knees and vowing to change their wicked ways, and San Diego residents exchanging "ghastly smiles, pale lilies they are. " The Sun's story was on the stands within minutes of the eclipse becoming total.

ATLANTA - On the night George Zimmerman fatally shot unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida, a witness said he saw some of the scuffle - and described a black man in a dark hoodie on top of a white or Latino man, punching him repeatedly, "mixed martial arts style. " Then there was a pop, the witness told police, according to documents made public Thursday in Zimmerman's second-degree murder case. Soon, he said, the man in the hoodie was "laid out in the grass. " The detail, one of many in a trove of discovery records released by prosecutors, could bolster Zimmerman's contention that he acted in self-defense on the night of Feb. 26, after he called police and reported Martin as a suspicious character in his neighborhood.

At any one time, hundreds of clinical trials are underway in the U.S. to test simpler and more effective ways to treat and prevent HIV infection, which afflicts more than 1 million people in this country. Most of those in the U.S. with HIV - and with AIDs in its full-blown stage - are men. So, understandably, men make up the majority of the participants in the trials. However, women, who account for 25% of those living with HIV in the U.S., are significantly underrepresented in clinical trials, according to infectious disease researchers and health professionals who have studied this issue.

C. David Heymann, a bestselling biographer whose titillating accounts of famous lives often were criticized as inaccurate or dishonest, including a book on heiress Barbara Hutton that was recalled because of factual disputes, has died. He was 67. Heymann died Wednesday after collapsing in the lobby of his New York City apartment building, said his agent, Mel Berger. The cause was believed to be cardiopulmonary failure. Initially a poet and critic, Heymann wrote books on Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell before turning to popular biography with "Poor Little Rich Girl: The Life and Legend of Barbara Hutton," published in 1983.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - It took less than a minute for the Clippers' bench to step in and save the team's season. In the fourth quarter of his team's most important game, Coach Vinny Del Negro chose to open exclusively with his second unit. Just 52 seconds later it paid off as center Kenyon Martin and guard Nick Young made back-to-back jumpers to turn the Clippers' one-point deficit into a four-point lead. The Memphis Grizzlies immediately took a time out, and while they dawdled back to the huddle, the Clippers flew through the air, chest-bumping each other in the middle of a now-silent arena.

It's tough enough to be without health insurance. But do healthcare providers have to make it even worse by treating you like a moron? Santa Monica resident Tom Wilde recently received bills from a downtown Los Angeles clinic and the L.A. County/USC Medical Center totaling almost $2,500. What exactly were the charges for? The bills didn't say. There was no itemizing of procedures and prices. No diagnosis. No treatment date. No nothing. Just a notation of "new charges" and the amount due. "They certainly wouldn't send such a bill to an insurance company," Wilde, 51, told me. "Insurance companies want to know exactly what they're paying for. " So you'd think.

China has begun a review of its accounting firms and plans to close a handful by 1999 in a reform drive, the Business Weekly newspaper reported. Lax accounting regulations are considered a potential hindrance to further investment in China. Last month, securities regulators accused eight newly listed companies of exaggerating their profit-making potential in their prospectus, the report said.

The Senate Banking Committee and the Securities and Exchange Commission have issued separate proposals for a new accounting-industry oversight board. Here's a look at the proposed makeup and functions of the board, as described in a bill passed by the Senate committee Tuesday and in a draft the SEC will consider at a meeting Thursday: * Board makeup: The Senate bill proposes a five-member board, with no more than two members from the accounting profession.

BEIJING - The Chinese government has ordered the world's Big Four accounting firms to appoint Chinese citizens to head their mainland operations within five years, an edict that could crimp the auditors' expansion in one of the world's most important markets. The new regulations, announced Thursday by China'sMinistry of Finance, also require Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG to localize their management ranks starting this year. Although the firms have hired thousands of Chinese accountants in recent years, many of their senior staffers have come from outside China.

Kenneth Leventhal, a Los Angeles accountant who oversaw some of the largest real estate transactions in the country, died Tuesday at his Bel-Air home. He was 90 and had prostate cancer. Leventhal was a key figure in the transformation of Southern California after World War II as the region grew into a densely populated metropolis. His firm, Kenneth Leventhal & Co., guided such prominent real estate developers as Ray Watt, Trammell Crow and Donald Trump through times of expansion and financial distress.