Note: Some very helpful comments on my most recent post have led me to conclude that I made some factual and logical errors. Fortunately, though, my main message, that stock issuance costs should be recorded as an expense, is not affected;…
The FASB is now 40 years old, and its lease accounting standards are about the same age. Some would say that SFAS 13 was obsolete when issued, but it only became a front-burner topic for the FASB about a decade…
Let's pretend that we could decide anew how accounting standards for U.S public companies should be promulgated. Who would want the operations to be run by the Financial Accounting Foundation? Are there other options? When it was established in 1972,…
(Note to readers — I have deleted the reference to Worldcom in a previous version of this post. A dialogue with one reader caused me to re-consider my statement that account roll forwards could have saved an audit process that…
A couple of posts ago, I waded in on the infamous Reinhard & Rogoff spreadsheet error, in an attempt to extract lessons of a cautionary nature for accountants of public companies. Since then, two interesting developments have occurred. First, I…
After having just written a post on HP’s massive write-off of goodwill, I am reluctant to keep on banging the drum of how bad goodwill accounting can be. But, I can’t resist following up on Bloomberg columnist Jonathan Weil’s coverage of yet another…
Hewlett Packard Co. claims they were 'misled' (to put it mildly) by accounting 'misstatements' (to put it mildly) into overpaying, on the order of $8 billion, to acquire Autonomy. But, if anybody outside of HP has precise knowledge of those…
[This is my fourth consecutive post on loan accounting. Here are the first, second and third.] I love finding accounting lessons buried in stories that on their surface seem to have little to do with accounting. See, for example, my…
This is my second post reviewing the SEC Staff's Report on its IFRS Work Plan. My first post is here. To recap only slightly, the best news to come out of the Staff Report is a forthright acknowledgement that outright…
I am proud to announce that I did my civic duty yesterday. I turned off all of my electronic devices for the entire day and actually read the entire final SEC Staff report on its IFRS Work Plan. After finishing,…