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 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…
John White, Director of the SECs Division of Corporation Finance, gave a speech at Financial Executives International Global Financial Reporting Convergence Conference last week (June 5, 2008). In no uncertain terms (and with apologies in advance for the bad pun),…
On May 14, 2008, the SEC voted to propose its long-awaited XBRL rule, requiring companies to provide the information contained in financial statements, notes and accompanying schedules in a format amenable to interactive search and analysis. The XBRL data tag information would…
Much ado has been made lately of the insubstantial contribution business school professors have made to practice through research. Accounting research of the last forty years, being no exception, was blasted in a commentary in the Chronicle for Higher Education…
Note: This post was published about 12 hours prior to publication of Justin Hyde's article on the same topic in the Detroit Free Press. Justin was the one who brought the topic to my attention, and I made the decision…
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled "FAS 157: Fair Value Has left the Station--But Is It on the Wrong Track?" Walter Teets of Gonzaga University and I have converted it to a working paper. The new title…
Would you like your staff to learn more aboutSEC reporting? Click here for a sample in-house training agenda!Call me cynical, but I am wary of accommodations that permit companies to freely choose between their best estimates and something less. Even…
The CFA Institute recently published a monograph entitled A Comprehensive Business Model: Financial Reporting for Investors, calling for a "...broader, more comprehensive business reporting that provides sufficient information to investors that is needed to understand the wealth-generating [emphasis supplied] activities…
As I feared in earlier posts (here, here and here), but naively hoped against, the Republican-dominated SEC has carried the water for Big Business and anti-regulation ideology by eliminating the IFRS-to-U.S. GAAP reconciliation requirement. Investor advocates and other thoughtful people…