In yesterday's post, I wrote about Merrill's big bath charge. Two other recent news items confirm that not much as changed since Arthur Levitt declared war on earnings management games almost 10 years ago: the big bath accounting charge still…
In a story whose main subject was increasing auditor vigilance, the Associated Press wrote as follows on November 2, 2007: "Merrill Lynch last week reported a bigger-than-expected $8.4 billion in writedowns.... On Oct. 5, the investment bank had initially said…
Would you like your staff to learn more aboutSEC reporting? Click here for a sample in-house training agenda!Teri Lombardi Yohn, an associate professor at Indiana University, has provided Senate testimony on the SEC's proposal (Rel. No. 33-8818)to permit foreign private…
It should come as no great surprise to savvy analysts that far too many accounting standards were written to benefit someone else other than investors and analysts. FAS 144 on impairment of long-lived asset is yet another example, but perhaps…
I speak U.S. GAAP most of the time, so when I prepare to deliver courses on International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS or IAS are basically interchangeable acronyms), I begin by re-reading some of the key standards, focusing especially on those…
FAS 158 makes it look like the 'funded status' of defined benefit post-employment benefit plans are now transparent. Actually, they are not. To see why, consider the following three transactions: Company A purchased 500 shares of its own stock on…
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…
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…