Financial Accounting Standards Research Initiative

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 > >

I know that many of you are preparing to teach soon, and your students might not fully appreciate the importance of your subject matter:  accounting.  You might start by talking about accounting’s crucial role in the development of writing, and civilization itself.  Attendees of the AAA meetings from several years ago might have seen Denise [...] Read more > >

The SEC hosted a Roundtable on IFRS July 7.   I turned on the archived webcast in the background as I worked through my email stack.  The discussions seemed similar to a roundtable the FASB held near the end of my term as Fellow.  But I did catch a few new words. Condorsement – Jeremy posted [...] Read more > >

One of the questions around the disclosure framework is how the FASB will coordinate with the SEC and IASB. One issue that may make this question even more interesting is that a new group has potentially inserted itself in the discussion. Last month, the PCAOB released a concepts statement outlining proposed revisions to the [...] Read more > >

I’m fascinated by the Groupon IPO that is underway. I’ll refrain from commenting or predicting the future (at least in a public forum such as this one), but I think this may turn into a great classroom case and possibly standard-setter motivation in the near future. If the IPO is successful, I believe it will go [...] Read more > >

Click on "read more" at the bottom of this post and then click here for an archived recording of the session and click here for Harry Evans' slides. The FASRI Round Table series continues at 4pm Eastern time on Tuesday, July 19. Rob Bloomfield, Lynn Rees and Phil Shane will moderate the session, and our guest speaker [...] Read more > >

Sir David Tweedie certainly leaves large shoes to fill. The progress made by the IASB in the last ten years under his direction has been incredible. On June 30, 2011 Sir David Tweedie retired from the IASB. Hans Hoogervorst is his new successor. You can read more about Mr. Hoogervorst here and here. Also of note [...] Read more > >

This past Friday the IFRS Foundation published its 2010 annual report. You can find the report here. I found the report quite interesting. The report contains, among other things: A list of G20 countries and their current IFRS policy (p. 3) A great statement by Sir David Tweedie in which he talks about the mission and history [...] Read more > >

The FASB’s current Disclosure Framework Project was initiated in response to recommendations from various investor groups and the SEC Advisory Committee. One of the groups to reach out to the FASB was the Investors Technical Advisory Committee. In reading through their 2007 letter, they state as part of their rationale: “In our view, our proposal can [...] Read more > >

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 treats [...] Read more > >

The Dow was at about 14,000 during October-November 2007 and at about 7,000 in February 2009. This resulted in losses in many companies’ pension funds. Many companies had unrealized losses exceeding the 10% corridor boundary, which meant the “excess” losses had to be gradually amortized into pension expense under U.S. GAAP.  For example, in 2009-2010 [...] Read more > >

I have been reading a recent paper by Mark Bauman (Univ. of Northern Iowa) and Richard Francis (Univ. of Texas – El Paso) published in Accounting Horizons (June 2011) on the topic of lessor accounting. For those academics who follow this standard setting topic, you already know there is a relative dearth of research that [...] Read more > >

Hopefully, you have all heard by now that the Monday morning plenary speaker in Denver at the AAA Meetings is Bob Herz, former Chair of the Financial Accounting Standards Board. The format of his presentation will be slightly different from the traditional format. That is, Mr. Herz has agreed to address questions that have been [...] 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 the [...] Read more > >

In my accounting seminar last semester we looked at a couple of papers examining analyst forecast trends (Ke and Yu 2006, Libby et al. 2008). Today I encountered an interesting Wall Street Journal article that discussed how these trends have been changing over time. I thought a few points were worth noting: The previous 9 quarters [...] 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 [...] Read more > >

As with many terms in financial reporting, the term comparability means different things to different people. Recently, I’ve read a number of papers that shed academic light on financial statement comparability, which means that the researchers had to define what they mean by comparability and then select an appropriate proxy for that construct. In this blog, [...] 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 [...] 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 > >