Apparently the Securities and Exchange Commission achieved so much acclaim last year when it published its Financial Reporting Manual last year that the agency is doing it all over again.

Speaking yesterday at Financial Executives International’s annual financial reporting conference, the top accountant at the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance, Wayne Carnall, said he and his staff want to raid all the wisdom and good ideas currently posted on the website of the Center for Audit Quality’s SEC Regulations Committee, and sweep said wisdom into an updated version of the Financial Reporting Manual that should be published by fall 2010.

The SEC staff and the CAQ “Regs Committee” have met numerous times each year for decades to discuss the finer points of financial reporting; often the committee asks the SEC to give its views on a specific topic, and those views then permeate the greater accounting world as SEC guidance. By now, Carnall said, the SEC and the Regs Committee have piled up positions on nearly 800 issues in public-company accounting—and the SEC staff has decided that if everyone else out there considers those positions “guidance,” the SEC might as well review them, pluck out the most important ones, and put them into an updated version of the Financial Reporting Manual.

Carnall made clear that this project will take a while; at best the update will arrive sometime in the late spring, but September 2010 is more probable. Nor did he say what sort of issues among the Regs Committee’s large trove would be more likely to catch the SEC staff’s eye for inclusion. Regardless, auditors and financial reporting executives can look forward to an even more informative, comprehensive document sometime next year. Mark your calendars.

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