The Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued an exposure draft of a new statement that would require employers to recognize the overfunded or underfunded positions of defined benefit pensions and other post-retirement plans in their balance sheets. The proposal would require employers to measure plan assets and obligations as of the date of their financial […]
Tammy Whitehouse
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
FASB, IASB Advance Push For Convergence
American and international accounting rulemakers have proposed a timeline to make the necessary changes in standards to drop reconciliation reporting requirements for non-U.S. companies listed on U.S. exchanges. The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board issued a joint statement last week elaborating on their plans to fulfill the “Norwalk Agreement” of […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
Audit Firms Fight State Boards For Privacy
Accounting firms have suddenly found themselves fighting on two fronts to shield sensitive criticism of their work from public view—scrambling to fix their operations to please federal regulators, even as state regulators have begun asking for private information in those federal oversight reports. The Big 4 firms have been making numerous changes to their quality […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
FASB Delays Fair Value Effective Date Until 2008
As the Financial Accounting Standards Board churns away on revisions to its proposed standard on fair value measurement, the Board decided it will not expose its latest revisions for a new round of public comment but instead defer the intended effective date into 2008. FASB acknowledged its has heard several requests to re-expose the standard […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
FASB Eyes Hedge Accounting; Disclosing Tax Returns?
The Financial Accounting Standards Board has decided to tackle four separate hedge accounting issues, including proper use of “the shortcut method,” to provide new guidance targeted at helping companies comply with complex derivatives rules. The Board stopped short, however, of agreeing to amend hedge accounting rules to allow a risk-based approach to fair value and […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
SEC Gives More Guidance On Cash Flow Corrections
Companies looking for direction on how to correct cash flow classifications now have more definitive guidance, following the Securities and Exchange Commission’s decision last week to make a speech on the subject and accompanying slides more widely available. The SEC has posted on its Web site the text of a speech delivered by Associate Chief […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
SOX Be Damned: Securities Registrations On The Upswing
Four years following its passage, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act remains a controversial measure to improve corporate governance and financial reporting—usually described by critics as so draconian it will turn companies away from capital markets in pursuit of cheaper, easier-to-obtain capital. Yet one bit of recent research suggests just the opposite: that smaller companies are listing on […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
Fair Value Input Sought; Restatements Up; More
To help steer the fair value ship, accounting rulemakers are reaching out to the readers of financial statements to find out if they like what they’ve seen so far in fair value accounting and where else it might be helpful in financial reporting. The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board have […]
Posted inFrom the Archive
Internal Control, IT Frameworks Converging On ERM
In that vast expanse that still divides the concerns of the CFO and CIO, new efforts to combine the challenges of financial reporting and IT management are emerging—bringing hope that the distance between those two officers is slowly getting shorter. In December, the IT Governance Institute issued version 4.0 of its IT framework commonly known […]
Posted inAccounting & Auditing
FASB, IASB Advance Push For Convergence
American and international accounting rulemakers have proposed a timeline to make the necessary changes in standards to drop reconciliation reporting requirements for non-U.S. companies listed on U.S. exchanges. The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board issued a joint statement last week elaborating on their plans to fulfill the “Norwalk Agreement” of […]