With its role in public company reporting diminished in the post-Sarbanes-Oxley era, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants is turning its attention to private company accounting, recommending standard setters begin a process of evaluating and potentially rewriting Generally Accepted Accounting Principles to make financial reporting more useful for private companies.
An AICPA task force made the recommendation last week while announcing the findings of a study it commissioned in which some 3,700 respondents collectively trounced certain aspects of GAAP. “When asked to rate the relevance or decision usefulness of a broad range of GAAP requirements on a scale of high, medium and low, all constituent group respondents who participated in the random survey rated certain GAAP requirements as being of low relevance or usefulness,” the study report says.
