I wonder why so little is made of the fact that key technical terms in U.S. financial reporting are misleading perversions of plain English? As a sampling, consider these, which I have written about in postings over the years: “Goodwill” is…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…