The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission recently took a subtle but significant swipe at an accounting practice now steadily falling out of vogue: structuring business mergers and other transactions so they look pretty on financial statements.
In this case, the SEC staff focused on application of new rules for business mergers that took effect in 2009 and are poised to be even more important in 2010. The new rules ended some long-held conventions about how to account for common transactions among unrelated business entities. And SEC staff has sent an important signal that they expect companies and their auditors ...