Thursday 28 October 2010

Did Financial Reporting contribute to the Global Financial Crisis

People sometimes ask me whether poor financial reporting, in particular the use of fair value measurement contributed to the Global Financial Crisis.

A recent article by Laux and Leuz in Accounting Organisations and Society reviews research on the question. It is linked from here.

The House of Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee is looking into the Audit Market. The meeting televised here considers the question of the financial crisis

http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=6801

Ex-chancellor Nigel Lawson describes the auditors as the dogs that didn't bark. Tim Bush provides a number deficiencies of IFRS, including the loss of 'prudence'.

IAS Plus has a timeline on regulation which includes summaries of a number of financial reporting issues

http://www.iasplus.com/crunch/creditcrunch.htm#0911casey

Accountancy Age has numerous articles touching on the topic. A list of them can be found here

How to find the conceptual framework

Further to my previous post, I find that one can obtain free access to the new chapters 1 and 3 of the conceptual framework from the FASB website, where it is lurking disguised as SFAC 8.

Tuesday 28 September 2010

The stately dance continues

The IASB and FASB have today published the definitive (for the moment) chapters of their joint conceptual framework for financial reporting. The project, which is supposed to lead to 'internally consistent' standards is already so riddled with contradictions that it has little credibility. However, the long extended search for a framework allows the standard setters to defer awkward questions almost indefinitely.

The latest twist [1] is the assertion that the purpose of financial statements is to

'To provide financial information about the reporting entity that is useful to existing and potential investors, lenders and other creditors in making decisions about providing resources to the entity.'

The irony of this is that most equity investors never provide any financial resources to an entity. They buy and sell second-hand shares. When new resources are supplied to an entity, more information, by way of prospectuses and so on, is created that supplements financial statements.


[1] Well I assume the final document includes this phrase. At the time of writing I'm relying on a previous document as I don't have access to the actual document; it is not freely available - one has to pay for a subscription to get it.

Thursday 18 March 2010

A new financial statement? Or an old one?

David Tweedie has apparently confirmed that the IASB is considering including a 'regulators'' page in financial statements so that people concerned with financial institutions can be given the information they need to ensure market stability. It's quite likely that this will include something that looks very like a historical cost balance sheet, and so, rather being something new, this might signal a return to something old.

This could be a fascinating accounting experiment and would give standard setters an opportunity to find out what information is actually demanded, has impact and has value relevance. I foresee the growth of a minor industry in researching the relative importance of regulatory and 'decision useful' information.

More on Lehman's

Our growth in understanding what went on at Lehman's proceeds apace. Despite the criticism of financial transactions that occurred in London, it seems the accounting that is at issue occurred in the USA. It's said that because the Repo transactions involved exchanging assets worth more than $105 for every $100 of cash received SFAS 140 permitted them to be treated as sales because Lehman's wouldn't have had enough cash to buy them back again.

Wednesday 17 March 2010

Layers of the onion

The Lehman collapse has been blamed as the crucial event in the credit crunch but now it is revealed that aggressive accounting had been hiding problems for some time. The device that it is alleged was used to manipulate the financial statements was accounting for repo (repurchase) transactions.

In a repo an asset (a block of loans, say) is exchanged for cash, and the exchange reversed some time later. In substance this is usually a short term loan with the asset being used as collateral.

It's alleged that Lehman's were accounting for these as sales so that the asset disappeared off the balance sheet and the cash was used to reduce net borrowing. The effect is to reduce the bank's reserve ratio to within acceptable limits.

How was Lehman able to count these transactions as sales rather than loans? How was it able to exploit the provisions of the relevant US accounting standard, SFAS 140? It is likely that Lehaman's did so by a piece of cheeky financial engineering whereby the transaction took three stages, with the asset going back and forth to the counter-party three, and ultimately, four times. The title link shows how this is done.

What we don't yet know, is why this had to be done in London, the role of fair value, whether the financial reporting in the UK reflected the same things as the American accounting, and whether the accounting was routed through off-shore vehicles.

This one will run and run.

Wednesday 27 January 2010

Success in Doctoral Studies

At a recent research forum the following success index for PhD studies was proposed:

PhD Success Formula

S= (HW + 3M + NR/4)xC/A
___________________
(1 + FM + FB/10 + S)

Where: HW= Hours worked on thesis

M = meetings with supervisor

NR = number of references

C= Average number of cups of tea/coffee per day +1

A=Average units of alcohol per day + 1

FM = ln(Number of family members)

FB= Number of Facebook friends

S= Number of Sports teams supported + 4 x Number of sports played regularly.

While this is clearly an early attempt at a descriptive index related to probability of success it indicates the need for further research to improve the functional form and parameterisation. One commentator has already suggested that comsumption of illegal drugs should be added into the measurement of A, for example.