We have thankfully come to the end of a year in which the gratuitous and repeated attempts by the FASB to converge U.S. GAAP with IFRS have finally devolved from "inevitable" to ignominy. Yet, standards setting dysfunction will…
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;…
(See a correction at the end of this post.) The CFA Institute has recently published a report that summarizes the findings of its member survey on the FASB and IASB's proposals for recognition and measurement of credit losses. The two…
On October 4th, Jon Weil published "An Accounting Lesson for Twitter." Here's how it starts: Whether he prevails at his insider-trading trial or winds up paying a fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas…
"The new, converged revenue recognition standard will include substantially less industry-specific, “bright-line” guidance than many U.S. companies are accustomed to." [italics added] That understatement is brought to you by the Journal of Accountancy. It's the lede for a story on a…
Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary, recently gave an interview to Marketplace host Kai Ryssdal to mark the fifth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy. More to the point, Mr. Paulson said that he decided to re-issue his book on the 2008…
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,…
The AICPA, in its spat with NASBA over its recently released Financial Reporting Framework for SMEs (my very own critique is here), has loudly and often declaimed that the purveyors of GAAP are supportive of their new non-GAAP option. That is,…
It recently occurred to me that the ongoing Disclosure Framework project and the comatose Financial Statement Presentation project have three things in common: Neither current disclosure nor presentation standards promote high quality financial reporting (perhaps one of the few things…