Global ethics and international accounting standards

The Publish What You Pay campaign is where international politics, financial reporting, and the developing world intersect. The campaign seeks to force companies in extractive industries (such as oil and gas) to make public their payments to governments in the developing world. It began in 1999 with an “exposé of the apparent complicity of theContinue reading “Global ethics and international accounting standards”

No new international accounting standards effective before 2009

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has announced they won’t be issuing any new standards or major amendments to existing standards with effective dates before January 1st, 2009, in order to give companies reporting under the standards a bit of a breather to get their house in order. Word around the accountant blogosphere has beenContinue reading “No new international accounting standards effective before 2009”

First options backdating investigation initiated by SEC

Brocade Communications Systems has become the first company to be formally investigated by the SEC regarding the recent options backdating issue. According to the SEC’s complaint document, which names three former executives of the company as plaintiffs, from 2000 through 2004 the company inflated net income by understating their options-related expense through fraudulent schemes toContinue reading “First options backdating investigation initiated by SEC”

What Enron meant to me

Enron burst into flames around January 2002. I was just starting my second semester at Brock University in the esteemed Bachelor of Accounting program when the Houston-based company went down. What did this mean to a 19-year-old Canadian accounting student with no share holdings and no knowledge of the energy trading giant from Texas? Actually,Continue reading “What Enron meant to me”

FASB’s new man talks advanced accounting topics

The accounting standards setting group in the United States is known as the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and consists of seven board members who are appointed to five year terms. The most recent appointment was Thomas J. Linsmeier, and CFO.com has a pretty good interview with him on some of the issues currently facingContinue reading “FASB’s new man talks advanced accounting topics”