The SEC has finally conceded that its efforts to adopt IFRS have failed. Damage control has begun in earnest, but the ship is still taking on water. The SEC took a tentative poke at the problem last May with the publication…
Nothing good comes from bad accounting, and many of the bad things that happen are easy to predict: excess bonuses to management, negative NPV investments, underfunding of pension plans, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Yet, the instance I'm writing about in this…
For a standards setter, Hans Hoogervorst, the new IASB chairman, doesn't know much about accounting. By his own frank admission, he wasn't even very interested in the subject until after the financial crisis hit in 2008, and he seems almost…
Every time I write a post, I might receive a couple of non-spam comments, and perhaps a few more private emails intended for my eyes only. Most of the feedback is positive, and even encouraging. Nonetheless, I am by nature…
If IFRS incorporation is supposed to be some fantastic opportunity for achieving one set of accounting standards worldwide, then why was no one at the SEC's Roundtable on IFRS jumping for joy at the prospect? You would think that someone, anyone,…
This is a short follow-up to yesterday's post on the upcoming SEC Roundtable on International Financial Reporting Standards. As I feared, the agenda is not even on the same planet as the core questions, indicating ever more strongly that the…
I'm looking forward to the SEC's July 7th IFRS Roundtable like surgery without anesthetic. Perhaps the SEC feels much the same, as notification was only posted to its public calendar of upcoming events within the last day or two –…
This post more or less (actually somewhat more, than less) mirrors my answers to questions posed by Matt Kelly, editor of Compliance Week in a recent podcasted interview. The subject was audit firm term limits, or mandatory audit firm rotation;…
Lots of "rethinking" has been going on of late. There's a new SEC staff paper rethinking how to take IFRS adoption/convergence off life support; and the FASB and IASB are rethinking how much they can give away to special interests regarding…
When you start with a bogus asset like goodwill (itself a misnomer), it's hard to find quality in the rules that govern its measurement. The root of the problem is that business combination accounting relies on a fantasy: that an…