Last June, the IASB issued revisions to IAS 19, Employee Benefits. The accompanying press release would have us believe that the five-year project resulting in incremental changes to the accounting for pension costs are a significant improvement; unfortunately, they are…
Yesterday, Han Hoogervorst, the IASB chair, sent a letter to the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA), in which he expressed concern for the pie-in-the-sky numbers produced by EU banks on their Greek bonds classified as 'available for sale' (AFS).…
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…
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…
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 –…
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…
A reader of my post on the CFA Institute's critique of the IASB's hedge accounting exposure draft suggested that I write to the two members of the IASB, Patrick Finnegan and Patricia McConnell, who had a close association with the…
Way back in November 2008 when Christopher Cox was calling the tune, the SEC issued its proposed "Roadmap" for achieving a "single set of globally accepted accounting standards." That was the point at which the IFRS-adoption-is-inevitable" pot banging reached deafening…