The Securities and Exchange Commission’s Advisory Committee on Improvements to Financial Reporting has kept itself busy this spring. In February, it issued a progress report that summarized its potential recommendations to simplify financial reporting; in March and May, it held follow-up meetings to discuss those ideas more thoroughly. I’ve already written about CIFR’s recommendation regarding […]
Scott Taub
Posted inFrom the Archive
Judgment Call: How to Make the Most of CIFR Proposal
Financial reporting is much more useful when those preparing the financial statements apply their expertise and judgment in an attempt to reflect the business in the most meaningful way. But in the difficult litigation and regulatory environment that has enveloped the accounting profession most of this decade, many accountants associate applying judgment with playing Russian […]
Posted inUncategorized
So You Think You Know the SEC …
The last year since I left the Securities and Exchange Commission has been a real eye-opener for me in lots of ways. Among the surprises that I’ve encountered are a number of widely held beliefs about the SEC staff that are simply incorrect. This has been reinforced during the past few months, as I’ve read […]
Posted inUncategorized
The Real Enemy of Financial Reporting: Us
In December 2005, while I was acting chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission, SEC Chairman Christopher Cox and I both spoke about reducing the complexity of financial reporting. We weren’t the first to mention this, and we weren’t the last, as the topic has been continually discussed in the two years since. In […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
IFRS and GAAP: The Good and the Bad
For decades, we in the United States have generally believed that our accounting standards are the best in the world. Much of the rest of the world has reinforced that view by accepting financial statements prepared under U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for use in their markets. But International Financial Reporting Standards are now accepted […]
Posted inInternal Controls
Setting Testing Levels For 404 Compliance
I was acting chief accountant at the Securities and Exchange Commission in May 2003 when the Commission’s first set of rules implementing the provisions of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act—the section that requires management and auditor reporting on internal controls—were passed. No other part of SOX has generated nearly as much controversy, anger, frustration, […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
Avoiding Unnecessary Restatements
There are too many restatements. I’d wager that everybody reading this column agrees with those first five words, and that’s why I used them to start off my first column for Compliance Week. Of course, those words don’t provide any insight. In the rest of this column and the columns that follow, I do hope […]