A former KPMG LLP partner was sentenced to a year and a day infederal prison for his role in eliciting confidential informationfrom the U.S. audit regulator to boost the firm's annual inspectionresults.

David Middendorf, KPMG's onetime national managing partner foraudit quality and professional practice, and Jeffrey Wada, a formerinspections leader at the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board(PCAOB), were convicted in March of multiple counts of fraud.Prosecutors said several former employees of the board, includingWada, helped funnel details about its inspection plans to leadersof KPMG, who used the information to change the audits.

Middendorf "was at the top of a chain of corruption thatthreatened to corrupt KPMG and the PCAOB's inspections process,"Geoffrey Berman, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said in astatement Wednesday. "Today's sentence recognizes the harm thisfraudulent scheme caused to the PCAOB and the auditing professionmore generally."