The IASB and FASB are meeting in London this week where leases is on the agenda. At the meeting, the Boards proposed a standards update that will require all leases with a term in excess of one year to be capitalized on the balance sheet. No surprise there; that has been the Boards’ position since it released [...] Read more > >
On Monday, March 12, Leslie Seidman, Chairman of the FASB, will host a 1-hour video webcast to discuss the Board’s priorities for 2012. The webcast features a discussion of several agenda projects, including nonprofit accounting and private company initiatives. Viewers will also have the opportunity to submit questions by email during the live webcast. The webcast [...] Read more > >
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 [...] Read more > >
One objective of this blog is to push out to the academic community decisions made by the FASB. Recent Acts of Congress (Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act) has resulted in additional fees levied on health insurers. How companies should account for these fees is the topic of the most recent Accounting Standards Update (ASU), [...] Read more > >
This week, the FASB and IASB announced plans to re-expose their proposed standard on leasing. This project was, until late last year, slated to be finished in July 2011. However, given the majors changes that have been raised during redeliberations, the boards have concluded that they are likely to end up with a document that [...] 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 > >
Implicit in the FASB’s conceptual framework is a balance sheet (rather than an income statement) perspective. This has nothing to do with the relative decision usefulness of balance sheet vis-à-vis income statement information. Instead, it is the result of a decision (which I agree with) to define income in terms of changes in net assets. [...] Read more > >
We have a unique opportunity to (hopefully) have some impact on the future of standard setting. The IFRS Foundation oversees the International Accounting Standards Board. The Foundation has issued a call for comments on its strategy review. Click here to see comment letters received to date and instructions for submitting a comment letter. This provides [...] Read more > >
As announced on Oct 29, 2010, the SEC released its first progress report on the Work Plan which will lead up to the Commission’s decision in 2011 on whether and how to incorporate IFRS into the US financial reporting system. Much of the progress report is dedicated to explaining what the SEC staff is doing [...] Read more > >
The FASB just issued a discussion paper seeking responses to nine questions about the implementation (effective dates and transition methods) of standards developing from a list of 10 currently circulating exposure drafts, including revenue recognition, financial statement presentation, financial instruments, etc. You can see the full list with proposed effective dates and transition methods by going to the FASB website [...] Read more > >