I have been teaching undergraduate “Accounting Theory” for the past three years. For reasons that I will explain below, I choose to begin the course by exploring differences between accrual accounting and cash flows; and relatedly, how to analyze a statement of…
While on the cusp of one more financial crisis, the time has come to ask yet again: What is the FASB accomplishing that will fix the deeply flawed accounting by banks for loan losses? Answer: nada, nichts, bupkis, absolutely nothing. Instead, the FASB has been wallowing…
At the recent AICPA-sponsored mega-conference on SEC and PCAOB developments (see KPMG’s summary, here), the SEC staff, and even its chair, devoted a significant amount of bandwidth to non-GAAP measures of financial performance. Some see this as part of the ongoing…
From the preface of Political Standards: Corporate Interest, Ideology, and Leadership in the Shaping of Accounting Rules for the Market Economy: "In subtle but significant ways, our corporate accounting system has been captured…. [T]he evidence of capture in accounting rule-making…
Something must have happened between my post criticizing the FASB’s proposals to reduce materiality to a legal exercise and last week’s meeting of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee. Just prior to the meeting, discussion of the proposals became an agenda…
This is my third post for today. About 20 years ago (it’s been that long already!), I had a fairly regular gig traveling to Europe and Dubai to make presentations about SEC disclosure requirements that applied to foreign private issuers,…
This is the second of three posts today. In this one, I want to talk about materiality — in general, and the recent proposals issued by the FASB. (The first post, a related one, is here.) Materiality vis-à-vis GAAP Before we…
I have three things to write about today, which for the sake of length and ease of future reference, I will publish as three separate posts. This is the first one. The FASB has recently proposed a materiality standard…
With inspiration and encouragement from the John Hughes IFRS Blog, this post is a partial recycling from 2010 of Merrily We Roll Along — Forward and Up. I had observed way back then that with XBRL on the rise, analysts…
After years of trying to work with the FASB on a revised conceptual framework, the IASB finally decided to abandon the goal of a fully converged framework and to finish a document for its own use. A draft is imminent,…