preview

Balance Sheet and Goodwill

Good Essays

Goodwill is an intangible asset, probably the most intangible of all intangible assets, hard to measure and even more difficult to account for. Goodwill today constitutes a much larger part of acquisition prices than it did previously, resulting in a much greater impact on financial statements.
During the twentieth century the concept of goodwill has changed significantly. In the earlier days goodwill was thought of as the good and valuable relationships of a proprietor of a business with his customers. The present concept is broader in that it encompasses many more intangible economic factors of a business enterprise and accountants now consider that goodwill results from the evaluation of the earning power of a business by investors …show more content…

It is no wonder that managements, in order to avoid this reduction in reportable earnings, frequently opt to use the pooling of interest method when they complete a merger. Since no goodwill is created, over-eager managers are able to pay outrageous prices for acquisitions with little or no accountability on the balance sheet. Since it makes no sense to have two different ways for accounting for a merger, the FASB decided they should eliminate the pooling of interest method and force all transactions to be done via the purchase method. Executives and politicians claimed this will significantly reduce the number of mergers since the new standards would cause reportable earnings to drop as soon as a company had completed an acquisition. As a concession, the FASB will no longer require goodwill to be written off unless the assets became impaired (which means it becomes clear that the goodwill is not worth what the company paid for it).
The FASB 's six members unanimously approved two new accounting standards on Friday July 23, 2001. Financial Accounting Statement 141 will eliminate the pooling-of-interest method for booking mergers. The method had been popular with dealmakers because it allowed companies to do deals at a premium without marking up their assets. These markups inflate the size of future amortization expenses and depressed reported earnings, supporters of pooling said. The FASB also passed Financial Accounting Statement 142 — a closely- related standard

Get Access