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,…
This post could turn out to be a little dry. So, to whet your curiosity, I'll start with the payoff: First, contrary to the conclusions of the FASB and IASB, level periodic lease expense does not reflect the unerlying economics of…
As I was sitting down today to write the second and final installment on periodic lease expense, I received this email from a friend [bold italics supplied by yours truly]: I was at the IMA annual conference …. Leslie [Seidman,…
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…
This may be a little hard to explain, but my thoughts went to lease accounting after reading Jonathan Weil's Bloomberg piece about the JPMorgan derivatives debacle. And, it happened again after I read Floyd Norris's piece in NYT about the…
Four years ago, I wrote of my extreme frustration over the SEC's settlement with the two Arthur Andersen partners who planned and supervised the 2001 audit of WorldCom. Six years after the fact, the SEC's slam-dunk case was settled with…
I haven't posted for a few weeks, because I broke my leg (road bicycling). I'm working on a few things having to do with leasing, but Floyd Norris's recent NYT column, "The Case for Global Accounting" has me back in…
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…
Click here for Part One of this Three-Part Series. * * * * * False Claim # 6: Costs of conversion to IFRS can be spread out over a long transition period. All I can do here is to point out…