"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…
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,…
When FAS 123R came into effect in 2005, it had been finally ordained that stock option grants must be accompanied by some modicum of expense recognition. The FASB had fought the good fight and had won — sort of. A…
If the FASB and IASB are doing such a good job mucking up financial statements by working together on convergence projects, why have they decided to go their separate ways in their quests to seek a cure for disclosure dysfunction? Based…
Shortly after my most recent post on the AICPA's new FRF for SMEs, NASBA issued a press release that was clearly intended to keep the public spat between the two national organizations from escalating: "The AICPA and NASBA are committed…
(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…
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…
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…