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…
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…
An excerpt from a WSJ blog: "Outgoing FASB Chairman Leslie Seidman has had plenty of time to tackle long-standing questions about whether accounting principles are more desirable than specific accounting rules, writes Emily Chasan. The debate over whether detailed rules…
Even if the average citizen might have shrugged with resignation over the Senate's abandonment of gun control legislation, surely she must be in awe of the power of the NRA to bend democratically-elected senators to its will. On a less-visible…
Continuing with my theme of the U.S. GAAP/IFRS convergence misinformation campaign being waged by the Journal of Accountancy, the latest and greatest example is an article from the February edition, "What have IASB and FASB Convergence Efforts Achieved?" that appeared…
In the main, the only reason my wife and I subscribe to magazines and newspapers in hardcopy is because she prefers them. I much prefer to get as much as possible from the web; the lone anomaly being the Journal…
Over the years, the notion of accounting for "substance over form" has been trumpeted in IFRS circles as the apotheosis of principles-based accounting. From a practical standpoint, something like it is absolutely necessary for filling in the large gaps in…
I read numerous news sources this week echoing the SEC's announcement that it finally has a case it thinks it can win against auditors stemming from the 2008 financial crisis. One journalist, Jon Weil of Bloomberg, takes it a step…
I will have a lot to say about the FASB's recent publication of its proposed revisions to the accounting for loans over the next few months. In particular, I'm going to vivisect the horrendous "basis for conclusions" section of Proposed…