All Accounting & Auditing articles – Page 107
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Blog
SEC Warns on Foreign Business vs. Joint Venture
Be careful what you call a “foreign business.” The Securities and Exchange Commission says it is seeing too many instances of companies trying to call their joint ventures “foreign businesses” for financial reporting purposes. Perhaps that’s because the reporting requirements might be easier to meet. See inside.
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FASB Wants Comment on Financial Instruments
Image: FASB wants public comment on one final aspect of its standard for financial instrument classification and measurement, focused on how entities should disclose hybrid financial instruments containing embedded derivatives that are separately recognized. FASB plans to get a proposal out soon so the comment period can be wrapped up ...
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Poll Finds Uncertainty on COSO, Revenue Recognition
Up to one-third of companies may not be implementing the new COSO framework for their 2014 financial reporting, and one-fourth don’t know when they will implement the framework.
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Article
Assessing Your Digital Marketing Risk
Internal auditors with not enough to do, cheer up: Digital marketing risk is emerging as a new headache to keep you busy. Data theft and fraud are rampant, and ways to find and seal up those weaknesses aren’t entirely clear. “It’s a newer area,” says Bill Michalisin of the Institute ...
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Applying the Three Lines of Defense Model
Compliance Week columnist Jose Tabuena continues his look at the Three Lines of Defense model this month by examining how a company can parcel out all its oversight functions across the three lines. Can compliance report to the risk-management function? (Yes.) Can internal audit and compliance be combined? (Only if ...
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COSO Relates Frameworks to Cyber Risks
COSO is urging companies to look at its framework with not just financial controls in mind, but cyber-security as well. A paper from the Committee details how the five components of internal control apply to the assessment of cyber-risks, with discussion on how the principles underlying the risk assessment, control ...
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Blog
Houses Passes XBRL Exemption as Survey Reveals Costs
The House of Representatives passed legislation that includes an exemption for 60 percent of all public companies from the SEC requirement to submit interactive financial statement data using XBRL. Meanwhile, an American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and XBRL U.S. study showed that nearly 75 percent of the smallest public ...
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FASB Jettisons Extraordinary Items From Financial Statements
In its quest to simplify accounting standards, the Financial Accounting Standards Board has adopted a new provision in Generally Accepted Accounting Principles that spares companies the requirement to display extraordinary and unusual items in financial statements. FASB said stakeholders had expressed concerns that companies often faced uncertainty over when to ...
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Article
XBRL Filing Frustrations Tilting Toward Resolution
Image: Good news for companies weary of the unfulfilled promises around publishing financial data using XBRL: Events are looming that promise either to halt the march toward XBRL compliance or finally shove its usage forward. “XBRL is not working,” says Hudson Hollister of the Data Transparency Coalition. “Instead of getting ...
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Blog
Public Companies Could Win Same Exception Given to Privates on Intangible Assets
FASB is taking a fresh look at a method to account for intangible assets it just permitted for private companies, to see whether the rule should be granted to public companies as well. The new method allows private companies to bypass the current GAAP requirement to recognize separately from goodwill ...
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Blog
XBRL Repeal for Small Companies Fails
This week the House of Representatives looked for a two-thirds majority vote to push through a proposal to exempt companies with revenues below $250 million from the XBRL filing requirement. The measure fell short, gaining just 276 votes out of the needed 281. More inside.
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Blog
Final 2013 Going-Concern Filings Expected to Decline
Audit firms’ going-concern warnings dropped again in 2013, for the sixth year in a row, according to a recent study from Audit Analytics. A review of opinions on 2013 financial results (issued throughout the course of 2014) indicates a drop of 5.9 percent from warnings for 2012. More study details ...
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Missing XBRL, Late Filings, and Worse
Jan. 7—Enthusiasts of XBRL technology, including the SEC, like to talk about its potential as a tool to make financial information easier to use. That future remains unclear. Here and now, however, errors in XBRL filings might be serving a more practical purpose: They can indicate other financial reporting problems ...
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Article
Recognize the Big Standards’ Changes
The auditing and financial reporting world will spend lots of 2015 preparing for the new revenue recognition standard going into effect by 2017—but from leasing to going concern warnings to IFRS adoption in the United States, plenty of other major changes may arrive as well. “Folks have come to see ...
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SEC Staffers Try to Untangle Business Unit Accounting Issues
Image: Title: RogersAt a recent national accounting conference on regulatory issues, staff members at the Securities and Exchange Commission, including professional accounting fellow Chris Rogers (left), offered lots of advice on how companies can better explain to investors the intricacies of joint ventures, spinoffs, pushdown accounting, and segment reporting in ...
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SEC Relaxes View on Goodwill Impairment Test Date
Staff members at the SEC are easing up their expectation on preferability letters when companies decide to change the date of their annual goodwill impairment testing. Acknowledging the judgment that goes into making such a determination, staff members will no longer request a preferability letter to be obtained and filed, ...
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Blog
Debt Modification May Lead to Hedge Accounting Questions
Dec. 29—A friendly reminder from the SEC and auditing experts: If your company plans to issue or modify debt now, before the Fed raises interest rates sometime in 2015, check your debt agreements carefully to see whether you have any embedded derivatives language in there—since that could trigger new disclosures ...
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SEC: Don’t Ignore Mortality Tables at Year-End
If your company is planning to set aside new mortality tables in arriving at assumptions about pension and other post-employment benefit obligations because they are simply too new, that might be a mistake. The SEC recently sent a clear signal to the accounting profession that companies need to consider new ...
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Article
SEC Nudges Companies on Cash Flows
The SEC is urging companies to tighten accounting procedures around the statement of cash flows, amid a steady rise in restatements associated with it. Speaking at the national AICPA conference earlier this month, SEC staffer Kirk Crews said the majority of errors were “due to relatively less complex applications” of ...
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Blog
The Ingredients for Good Non-Financial Reporting
Good disclosure begins with good standards. That has been challenging enough for financial reporting, and now investors want even more disclosure about important non-financial information. This week, Compliance Week columnist Robert Herz talks about the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (disclosure: he sits on SASB’s board), its effort to develop disclosure ...