If you took a look at the House Bill that went down in flames today, you might have caught Congress fiddling with GAAP as Rome burned. See Section 132 of the bill proposed to empower the SEC to suspend application of FAS…
With the SEC's publication of their proposed roadmap for the U.S. adoption of IFRS, all of the press coverage I have been reading has focused on the big picture. (As usual, Floyd Norris's is among the best.) But in the…
A couple of posts ago, I wrote about the SEC's project for revamping the reserves disclosures made by oil and gas companies. In particular, I focused on appropriate prices to be used for measuring the value of recognized reserves. Notwithstanding…
I concluded my previous post by stating that financial reporting could be a lot less complex if the exclusive focus were on providing information of value to investors. There are many examples of the costs of failing to adhere to…
Pre-eminent: "surpassing all others" (Compact Oxford English Dictionary); "having paramount rank, dignity, or importance" (Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary). I have interrupted composing a post that will solve all of the problems of securitization accounting to bring you this: my latest discovery…
The issue I'm going to focus on is one that has been on everyone's mind for the last few months, although in a somewhat different context: the price of oil. The SEC has issued proposed rulemaking release No. 33-8935, Modernization…
On July 9, 2008, in Washington, DC, the SEC hosted a roundtable "to facilitate an open discussion of the benefits and potential challenges associated with existing fair value accounting and auditing standards." The roundtable was webcast and lasted about four…
I had a pleasant back and forth correspondence with one my readers a few weeks ago. Carlomagno, as he called himself (I don't know his true identity), is a proponent of IFRS; and like me, he is of the opinion…
I am finally ready to contribute my two cents to the debate as to whether SFAS 157 is at least partly responsible for the subprime mortgage mess. I have pointed out in other contexts (here and here) the serious shortcoming…
I subscribe to a listserv for professors of accounting (http://pacioli.loyola.edu/aecm/) to discuss emerging technologies, pedagogy, and pretty much anything else. One of the recent topics of discussion on the listserv had to do with the impact of accounting complexity on…