The top U.S. securities regulator will ramp up its use of technology to analyze public securities filings for potential accounting abuses, one of its enforcement heads said on Friday. George Canellos, who was named co-director of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s enforcement division on Monday, said the commission will look at publicly traded companies for instances of “earnings management” - when firms take advantage of gray areas in accounting rules to make earnings look better than they really are. He made the remarks in New York at a seminar about regulatory enforcement trends sponsored by the Practising Law Institute, an organization that provides continuing education classes for lawyers. Canellos said the effort would occur over the next two years, and would be a new application of technology it has already used to find aberrant trading patterns and insider trading at hedge funds. “There are many other projects of this nature,” Canellos said, noting that the
↧