American Accounting Association

In December 2011, the SEC gave GE, Alcoa, and others leave to exclude from their 2012 annual meetings the proposals of shareholders calling for rotation of the companies' external auditors. This was counter to a decades-old rule excluding from proxy materials proposals that will affect firms' "ordinary business."

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Last month, when a pension fund owning stock in Bank of New York Mellon brought suit against that financial behemoth, the fund not only took aim at the bank's allegedly fraudulent currency trading, but it cited a variety of upbeat claims in its SEC filings that the plaintiff considered highly doubtful.

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