If you subscribe to The Atlantic magazine, the title of this post may ring a bell — a riff on “How American Politics Went Insane: It Didn’t Start with Donald Trump...” from the July/August edition. Now that I have made that acknowledgement, I will…
My previous post addressed three aspects of the auditor’s report: The PCAOB* proposal to require a discussion of “critical audit matters”; Whether use of non-authoritative GAAP should be given special mention by the auditors; and The opinion language that financial statements…
Why is it that shareholders of the largest public companies could pay around $80 million for their boilerplate audit reports, if the shareholders of smaller public companies pay only $80 thousand for exactly the same end product? Or, why is it that…
On the one hand, I am happy to report that we are approaching the end of the darkest era in the history of U.S. accounting standards, during which the Accounting Establishment did their best to convince the rest of us…
Yesterday was a big day for the capital markets. For the first time, startups can raise (relatively small amounts of) capital from the public without registering with the SEC and by offering its securities over the internet. It’s called “crowdfunding.” Some…
It’s hard to pick which of the major accounting standards convergence projects has given investors the shortest shrift. But leases is notable for one thing: the FASB’s handpicked Investor Advisory Committee (IAC) panned the FASB’s proposals, and then were completely ignored.…
If you are an AICPA member, you would have recently received an email like this one: "...[The AICPA's] governing Council has authorized an online member ballot on a proposal by the AICPA and The Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA)…
A journey through recent accounting time... It’s 2002 The Accounting Establishment declares that convergence of FASB and IASB rules is “inevitable.” At the top of a very long convergence to-do list is revenue recognition. It so happens that from decades of…
As I described in a previous post the FASB has two related proposals on the table related to materiality and financial statement notes: An amendment to Concepts Statement No. 8 to replace its ersatz definition of “materiality” — nothing but a re-phrasing…
With the Oscars nigh upon us, I should tell you that I fell short of my goal to see The Big Short. How did subprime mortgages morph into weapons of mass financial destruction? How did a self-anointed few amass untold obscene…