This is Gus.

Gus never comes into the office. He claims he does his best work "in the field."

Recently, Gus heard that DOL was upset that many CPAs were not following the AICPA audit guide, and other authoritative guidance, when reporting on employee benefit plan financial statements. Now, Gus is a very diligent guy, so he got out his audit guide, and he studied, and studied, and studied some more, until he knew it forwards and backwards. (Ok, so mostly backwards, but that's the kinda guy Gus is.)

"Whew!" he exclaimed! "That was almost as exciting as Clancy's last novel, "The Llama in the Kremlin." (Gus loves a good novel.)

"It took me a while to figure out that stuff about welfare plans accounting for postretirement benefit obligations, but now I got it!"

The next day, Gus read the DOL press release about how it didn't care if multiemployer plans ignored postretirement benefits. Now Gus is really confused. "You mean a multiemployer plan can ignore GAAP if it wants to, and DOL won't care, but if the local widget factory does exactly the same thing, DOL will impose fines of $1,000 a day?"

I didn't know what to tell him.

Yesterday, I noticed that someone had been eating Gus's copy of the audit guide.

(Update: now that the DOL has announced it will treat the SOP as GAAP, Gus is happy again, doing his "fieldwork",  and I have a slightly used audit guide available.  Maybe ebay will take it?)  

 

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