Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

Current revenue recognition criteria are easy to talk about in class but coming up with concrete examples, using companies that students have heard of has always been challenge for me. Well not any more. A recent Accounting Onion post highlighted a great example of an issue with the criteria requiring pervasive evidence of arrangement [...] Read more > >

Other Comprehensive Income has appeared in a couple of different posts recently.  It plays a role in pension accounting (see “is it time to fix accounting for pensions”).  The blog also reported that the FASB recently restricted the potential methods for disclosing OCI. The latter post raised some general questions about distinctions between net income [...] Read more > >

Lease accounting has received a lot of attention recently, given the fairly substantial changes being proposed by the FASB and the IASB in their joint project on lease accounting. One area of lease accounting that hasn’t raised as much discussion is how to account for short-term leases (i.e., leases with terms of less than one [...] Read more > >

On June 16, 2011, the IASB released its amendments to IAS 19 (Employee Benefits).  David Zion, accounting research analyst for Credit Suisse, reviews the implications of the amendments and concludes that “now it’s FASB’s turn” to “fix” pension accounting. In fact, he recommends that the FASB simply expose the new IASB rules, as is, to FASB [...] Read more > >

I told a brand new PhD student here at The University of Texas, Greg Capps, about my regular blogging on the FASB disclosure project. He had an interesting story to tell me. He said… “In my auditing days, perhaps the worst thing we did to a client was hand them the 250-page GAAP Disclosure [...] Read more > >

I got an email alerting me to an interesting news item from Bloomberg.  The story discusses how some Chinese firms become publicly traded in the U.S. but would not qualify to be listed in Hong Kong.  The story mentions that 98 Chinese companies used “reverse-merger” to get listed in the U.S.  “The MSCI China Index [...] Read more > >

…or so says The Economist in this article. While I generally think highly of the The Economist, this article contains one of my pet peeves, which is a loose discussion of fair value. In particular, the article states that “In 2009, under its previous chairman, Bob Herz, FASB narrowly voted 3-2 that all assets should be [...] Read more > >

Not only will I be blogging about the Unit of Account / Disaggregation / Net vs. Gross / Whatever Words you Use, but I also will be posting about the FASB’s new disclosure project. So, what do you say when you teach your classes?? Probably what I say “oh yes and there are [...] Read more > >

The FASB just issued an accounting standards update concerning the presentation of comprehensive income.  Under prior guidance, companies can report comprehensive income in three ways.  The update eliminates one option – reporting the details of other comprehensive income in the statement of changes in stockholders’ equity.  The update continues to allow reporting in either a [...] Read more > >

Since SOX, public companies have had mandatory audit partner rotations. Recently, PCAOB Chairman Doty has suggested that perhaps partner rotation isn’t enough; firm rotation might be necessary to preserve audit quality and independence. You can read more about this here and here. To quote Chairman Doty, Considering the disturbing lack of skepticism we continue to [...] Read more > >