Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

The FASB’s project on Risks and Uncertainties (formerly “Going Concern”) has been full of twists and turns.  The most recent decision on this project was made this past Wednesday when the Board voted 4-3 against a proposal that would switch the responsibility of assessing the going concern assumption from auditors to managers.  To illustrate how this [...] Read more > >

Many terms in accounting refer to a probability assessment.  The Contingencies Topic in the FASB’s Codification uses the terms probable, reasonably possible, and remote to describe the likelihood of events occurring that will confirm a loss contingency.   The phrase more likely than not is used in several topics, including, goodwill impairment and deferred tax assets, [...] Read more > >

The Boards have divided the project into three areas: 1) classification and measurement, 2) impairment, and 3) hedging.  The FASB will probably re-expose their decisions on classification and measurement in early 2012; impairments will probably be re-exposed later in 2012.  With respect to hedging, there is still too much work to be done to predict [...] Read more > >

"Libby Boxes" Revenue recognition is one of FASRI’s key target areas for research over the coming year.   We are going to take a big step forward on Tuesday, October 6th, 4pm by laying out some possible approaches to research studies on RevRec.  We will be structuring our discussion around the key independent variables that researchers might [...] Read more > >

Kathy Petroni (Michigan State) will be joining us June 10th, 11am ET, to talk about her paper “Comprehensive Income:  Who’s Afraid of Performance Reporting?”. The paper, co-authored with Linda Bamber, John Jiang and Isabel Wang, now forthcoming in The Accounting Review, touches on some timely and controversial topics. For starters, let me say that the [...] Read more > >

A few weeks ago FASB Board member Leslie Seidman joined us for office hours.  We covered a lot of ground, and Ray has already written on some of her ideas for research.  I thought I would summarize her rather cautionary views on fair value accounting for financial instruments.  Playing to the academic audience, Ms. Seidman [...] Read more > >