Blog

It seems that business practice tends toward greater exploitation of opportunities for collaboration over time.  On a personal note, it has been said that people don't choose to become professors because they are smart, but because they couldn't play nicely…

I have often started a class discussion with the following series of statements: We learned in Finance 101 that the value of a business is the present value of expected future distributions of cash to owners. Financial statements are the…

Every three months, the SEC Regulations Committee  of the AICPA takes SEC staff members to lunch, and discuss emerging issues relating to SEC financial reporting rules and regulations.  Sometimes the SEC will use the Regs Committee as a conduit to…

Jonathan Weil, the accounting and corporate finance columnist for Bloomberg News, has written an excellent column (read it!) on auditors failing to provide going concern qualifications in reports when they are clearly warranted.  I want to comment briefly on the…

FAS 52 on foreign currency translation took effect in 1982 after one of those infamous 4 - 3 votes.  Like other accounting rules promulgated by the FASB, it is nonsense, for the sole purpose of helping CEO's smooth their reported…

Auditors are not priests, immune to the temptations of the material world.  Many of us have come to realize that even priests are not priests.  Granted, the mindset may have been different in 1933.  That's when representatives of the accounting…

Mechanical measures of earnings quality, though far from perfect, can direct the attention of audit committee members and others to matters that may require their attention.  The authors of an academic paper (funded by the Big Four accounting firms) entitled…

This is a rather long post, for which I apologize in advance.  It is an adaptation of a much more diplomatic comment letter that I wrote to the PCAOB, criticizing its proposed, and ultimately adopted, definitions of 'material weakness' and…