My best insights (but who am I to judge?) come from reading something for which accounting is the furthest thing from the author's mind: "My own view is that people tend to underestimate the pace of technological change but they…
One of the items in my inventory of pet peeves when I first started blogging (six years ago!) was interperiod tax allocation, familiarly known as "deferred tax accounting." I've always objected to it on theoretical grounds, and know that it…
Over the years, the notion of accounting for "substance over form" has been trumpeted in IFRS circles as the apotheosis of principles-based accounting. From a practical standpoint, something like it is absolutely necessary for filling in the large gaps in…
If you are looking to buy a holiday present for an accountant, then you should consider Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created Modern Finance. It's a pretty fast read – both for its moderate length (256 pages) and…
The purpose of this post is to review a recently published monograph authored by former FASB Chair Dennis Beresford. To summarize, it supports the status quo for money market funds, and I want to explain why I think the reasoning…
We have been covering loan impairment for the past few weeks, and the FASB's proposals leave me with the feeling that we will be discussing it for a long time to come. Once the FASB shoves its post-WWI-Germany-derived "Current Expected…
In my previous post, I committed to providing a statement of my own accounting principles with newer readers of this blog in mind. I am also adding a few observations about what the process of standard setting has come to…
In response to my previous post, Edith Orenstein (author of the FEI blog and fellow Ohio State alum) asked me whether I preferred the status quo "incurred," or the proposed "expected" loan loss model (CECL). Also in that post, I…
The best thing to come out of the lease accounting project is that, except in very limited circumstances, 'operating lease' accounting will be jettisoned. At the inception of a lease contract, lessees will have to recognize a liability to make…
Many books and articles have been written to describe the mishaps that led to the Great Recession of 2008, but few have done so while putting the role of accounting standards and auditing in context. I reported back in January…