Is An Empty Tag Such As <a href="#"> Valid For Accessibility Purposes?

I have a question that I have been struggling to find the answer to and maybe someone here can shed some light on this. I manage several websites that use a featured article scroller on their homepages, which allows the user to click a forward or back arrow in order to see the next article headline and blurb while remaining on the same page. I use WAVE's accessibility checker and any sites that have this particular plugin throw an error back because within the code there is an empty link, written as <a href="#">. Is there any way around this? I've defined a title tag but the # is causing the empty link error to still come up. Some places I've seen that this is perfectly acceptable and others claim this is a problem. What's the actual answer and potential workaround?