This post relates to some prior threads. Its main basis is the IASB’s amended pension guidance (Phil’s post). It is also about what goes to OCI (my post). And finally it considers another type of intangible that may or may not be an asset (Jeff W’s post). My curiosity is how the new IASB guidance [...] Read more > >
On Thurs, July 7, the SEC will hold a roundtable on International Financial Reporting Standards. The agenda (available here) looks to cover aspects of the Work Plan with particular emphasis on investor, small company, and government preparedness. The event will be webcast and is scheduled to run from 10 am to about 4 pm in [...] Read more > >
A Tuesday June 28th Financial Times article entitled “Accelerated Buy-Backs Make a Comeback” indicated that companies were using excess cash to buy back their own stock. Rather than the traditional buy back process (where a broker buys back the company’s stock .. on behalf of the company), the company is accelerating the buy back. What [...] Read more > >
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 before [...] 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 Checklist [...] 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 [...] Read more > >