Tammy Whitehouse

The Financial Accounting Standard Board and its international counterpart have lurched forward yet again in their quest to converge rules for calculating earnings per share. FASB has issued a revised exposure draft of a standard it first proposed in 2005 to converge EPS accounting rules. The International Accounting Standards Board, meanwhile, has published a parallel […]

Plans to overhaul accounting for corporations’ potential problems are driving yet another wedge between Corporate America and shareholder activists. The eye of the storm this time: lawsuits. Comments poured into the Financial Accounting Standards Board earlier this month over its proposed new standard on accounting for contingencies, which could force companies to disclose much more […]

A new academic study gives credence to what many already suspect about new regulations: they almost always produce secondary, unintended changes in company behavior. “They might get rid of one problem, but boy are there going to be unintended consequences,” says Robert Libby, a Cornell University business professor who co-authored the study. “Regulators may need […]

Although a clear path toward adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards in the United States hasn’t been established, the largest public companies are already mulling their approach toward converting to a new accounting system. Given the massive complexities such a conversion is likely to involve—especially when moving from the highly prescriptive U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting […]

The Financial Accounting Standards Board has agreed to stall some reforms meant to clean up off-balance-sheet accounting, a reluctant admission that the Board can’t move quickly enough to fix the problem by 2009 as originally planned. FASB voted last week to revise the planned time lines around amendments to Financial Accounting Standard No. 140, Accounting […]

More than one quarter of large public companies are not meeting the disclosure requirements for tax reserves required under the controversial, tell-all accounting rule Financial Interpretation No. 48, Accounting for Uncertainty in Income Taxes. The consulting firm Seigel & Associates conducted a review of annual reports in the first quarter of 2008, studying the filings […]

As a U.S. transition to international accounting standards appears more and more inevitable, corporate tax departments need to get a seat at the table to assure they’re included in the monumental planning process that is beginning to unfold. That’s the advice of tax advisers, who say it’s critical for companies’ tax staff to share their […]

In its work to revise accounting rules around transfers of assets and liabilities, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided to remove an exception that allowed companies under certain conditions to skip the fair value measurement if they determine such measurement can’t be done. Financial Accounting Statement No. 140, Accounting for Transfers and Servicing of […]