On Tuesday, Dec 1st, 4 pm ET, we will be joined by Patrick Finnegan, who was recently appointed to a 5-year term on the International Accounting Standards Board. Pat is a former Director of the Financial Reporting Policy Group at CFA Institute Centre for Financial Market Integrity, where he led a team responsible for providing [...] Read more > >
You are probably aware that someone has (apparently illegally) published email correspondence involving climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. This prompts me to think of writing two posts. Later on, if I get the courage, I will write a post about how we deal with messy data — the emails discussing the matter [...] Read more > >
For most of this decade, the Financial Reporting Issues Conference has been my favorite accounting event of the year. Taking a Bayesian perspective, I also view it as the most informative: every year, what I learn changes my beliefs more than any other conference. I will be writing some posts about the substance of the [...] Read more > >
When the AAA-FASC committee wrote a letter opposing the Perlmutter Amendment, I asked “Are there any academics who would support such a proposal?” It turns out the answer is yes: David Albrecht of Concordia College, and author of the blog The Summa (as in the book by Brother Luca Pacioli, father of double entry bookkeeping). [...] Read more > >
The Perlmutter amendment that would allow a regulator to set GAAP is getting a lot of press. But Congress members have more work in mind for the FASB. Representative Scott Garrett has proposed an amendment that requires the FASB to study the economic effects of its recent securitization rules (FAS 166 and 167). Apparently, Garrett [...] Read more > >
FEI just held their 28th Current Financial Reporting Issues Conference in NYC. Lots of big names in financial reporting were on the schedule, including several high-level representatives from the FASB and the SEC. You can read about some of what was said at the conference on the FEI blog (here and here). Lots of interesting [...] Read more > >
We reported last week on the Perlmutter amendment. In the typically understated fashion of accounting professors, the AAA-FASC wrote a letter opposing it. Such an amendment would shift the power to promulgate accounting standards from the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to a Systemic Risk Oversight Council, and it would shift the objectives of financial [...] Read more > >
That was just one of the many comments made by first-rate blogger Tyler Cowen of George Mason’s Economics Department, and author of Marginal Revolution (listed by the WSJ as one of the top 25 economics blog), during our phone conversation last week. Tyler is just one of many bloggers at GMU, which is taking a [...] Read more > >
It was great to have Stephen Penman participate in our round table discussion this past week. It is worthwhile to listen to someone else’s views on standard setting, particularly when those views have been somewhat critical of the current state of standard setting. Although I still have many questions about the completeness of Stephen’s framework [...] Read more > >
In their joint meeting in Norwalk, Connecticut last month, the IASB and FASB affirmed an earlier decision that an “insurer should recognize all acquisition costs as an expense when incurred. In addition, both Boards agreed that the insurer should not recognize a part of the premium as revenue (or income) at inception equal to the [...] Read more > >