Fifteen accounting firms have drawn disciplinary action from the Securities and Exchange Commission and Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. All of the actions involve the regulators' findings that the firms violated independence standards by using data provided from broker-dealer audit clients to prepare financial statements for those same clients.

SmartVault, which makes online document storage, has received $4.5 million in second-round funding. The investors include the founders of CyrusOne and original investors in Softlayer. The company said the capital will enable it to accelerate development of its core offering and to scale operations to support its integration of the online storage capability with Intuit's Lacerte and ProSeries professional tax preparation products.

Sage has introduced an analytical tool called Sage View that the company says will help accountants  provide advisory services to client. But software publishers introduced those kinds of tools in the early 2000s and they went nowhere. So what does Sage think is different now?