Even if the average citizen might have shrugged with resignation over the Senate's abandonment of gun control legislation, surely she must be in awe of the power of the NRA to bend democratically-elected senators to its will. On a less-visible…
My best insights (but who am I to judge?) come from reading something for which accounting is the furthest thing from the author's mind: "My own view is that people tend to underestimate the pace of technological change but they…
One of the items in my inventory of pet peeves when I first started blogging (six years ago!) was interperiod tax allocation, familiarly known as "deferred tax accounting." I've always objected to it on theoretical grounds, and know that it…
Continuing with my theme of the U.S. GAAP/IFRS convergence misinformation campaign being waged by the Journal of Accountancy, the latest and greatest example is an article from the February edition, "What have IASB and FASB Convergence Efforts Achieved?" that appeared…
In the main, the only reason my wife and I subscribe to magazines and newspapers in hardcopy is because she prefers them. I much prefer to get as much as possible from the web; the lone anomaly being the Journal…
After having just written a post on HP’s massive write-off of goodwill, I am reluctant to keep on banging the drum of how bad goodwill accounting can be. But, I can’t resist following up on Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil’s coverage of yet another…
Companies overpay to acquire other companies all the time; but Hewlett Packard Co. just might be the new record holder for getting fleeced. I don't have the exact amount, but let's say that the goodwill HP initially recorded from the…
Over the years, the notion of accounting for "substance over form" has been trumpeted in IFRS circles as the apotheosis of principles-based accounting. From a practical standpoint, something like it is absolutely necessary for filling in the large gaps in…
I read numerous news sources this week echoing the SEC's announcement that it finally has a case it thinks it can win against auditors stemming from the 2008 financial crisis. One journalist, Jon Weil of Bloomberg, takes it a step…
I will have a lot to say about the FASB's recent publication of its proposed revisions to the accounting for loans over the next few months. In particular, I'm going to vivisect the horrendous "basis for conclusions" section of Proposed…