Fair Value Accounting

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

Understandably, there are a variety of ways in which a company can manage their earnings, and if accomplished successfully, the results can be highly profitable. Not all techniques are fraudulent, as effective earnings management is considered good for business and shareholders. Income smoothing is a specific example of permissible earnings management that involves controlling fluctuations in net income to make earnings less variable over a given period of time (Goel & Thakor, 2003). Smoothing is acceptable as long as it adheres to the restrictions of U.S. GAAP, which maintains that all revenues and expenses are accounted for in a defined fashion. There are a lot of incentives in figuring how to effectively smooth income, as substantial value can be created through the successful arrangement of financial transactions. Management is able to make more intelligent decisions with regards to the future of the firm if the earnings are able to match the forecasts. One instance this is seen is when management is faced with the decision to smooth total income or

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

Using the financial balance sheet as displayed in the text, provide an example of how purchasing an asset or issuing stocks or bonds could potentially impact earnings targets.

The changing nature of business from cost-bases assets and liabilities to more market-oriented assets and liabilities drove the move towards increasing use of fair value accounting. Under the momentum, a measure like net income

In our presentation, we want to discuss how fair value accounting affects society in businesses. One example of how this effected society as a whole was the 2008 financial crisis. In this financial crisis, many companies were impacted but in particular AID insurance company faced a 11 billion dollar write down of debt before FASB introduced their new guidelines of SFAS 157. If this happened after these guidelines were passed, this company would have had a loss more like 900 million dollars. As a result, a company with trillion dollars of assets reported unrealized losses of tens of billions. Another area that was impacted was the American Banking

Pro forma earnings are earnings which often exclude non-recurring items and are defined by each individual firm rather than under the general accepted accounting principle (GAAP). Pro forma earnings reporting is commonplace in the U.S. (Doyle et al. 2013; Bentley et al. 2016). Items such as nonrecurring gains and losses, depreciation and amortization expenses, write-downs, restructuring and merger costs, stock compensation expenses, and interest expenses are often excluded in pro forma earnings figures. Since many of these exclusions are likely to be transitory in nature, pro forma earnings can be viewed as a better measure of permanent earnings and have received increasing focus recently. Research studies found that pro forma earnings are more value relevant, informative, and better associated with stock prices than GAAP earnings (Bradshaw and Sloan, 2002; Bhattacharya et al.,2003; Brown and Sivakumar, 2003; Entwistle et al., 2010). However, exclusion of the non-recurring items is completely discretionary (Doyle et al., 2013) and managers may use the flexibility to opportunistically influence the market’s perception of the firm’s recurring earnings (Dechow and Schrand, 2004). Managers may have strong incentives to manipulate the reported pro forma earnings to influence investors’ perceptions about the

There has been much debate over whether FAS 157 sparked the economic crisis or whether big companies, such as financial institutions, only want to use mark to market when it suits them. (Did an Accounting Rule Fuel a Financial Crisis 2008). Critics say fair value can distort market realities, but proponents argue it actually creates transparency by reflecting the up to date reality of an asset or liabilities' worth. (Johnson 2008). Many companies have had to write down assets causing huge losses in their financial statements at a time of economic crisis. Some of these companies blame the fair value measurement on the economic crisis and are lobbying in Washington to change the rule.

Over the past several years, there has been a growing controversy over the accounting issues of fair values and historical cost. The basis of this controversy revolves around which one of these principles is the most accurate. There are many different viewpoints on this issue. Many accounting professionals believe that fair value is just as accurate as the historical cost principle, while others believe that the historical cost is more reliable. The facts about each of these valuation methods will be researched and explained throughout this research document, as well as the different viewpoint about which method is the most accurate and reliable.

The United States has become increasingly concerned with the quality of earnings reported from companies. Although the quality of earnings should be able to be used as a predictor to the future of the company, management policies have been able to find a way that makes the company seem as if incoming income is steady, even if it is not. Ways like over and understating stating expenses can make a company seem better than they are. While the use of non-GAAP earnings can have benefits, many individuals are worried that using non-GAAP earning will lead to giving out false financial reports. No matter the accounting method used, all managers must act ethically on behalf of the law, and the company.

Financial world is at the pace when the accountants are moving their steps towards fair value accounting, moreover FASB and IASB is motivating accountants to increase the use of fair value accounting by establishing new rules. Most of the people concur that fair values are the most reliable measure for financial assets and liabilities that an entity strongly trades, on the other hand some believes if management wants to hold an asset or liability till their maturity then historical method is best for measuring financial assets.

One explanation of why firms might choose to put into practice conservative accounting practices lies in efficient contracting theory, for example, conservative accounting can be used as part of a firms strategy to ease the conflicts that arise among the many claimants of a firm’s net assets. This is because conservative accounting methods place restrictions on the distribution of those net assets thereby limiting the scope for self-serving opportunistic behavior. Conservative accounting can also help in bringing into line the interests of managers and shareholders through its impact on accounting earnings measures that are regularly used in management compensation contracts (Iyengar & Zampelli, 2010).

In the underlying paper the author re-examines the conservatism principle and its asymmetric effects on earnings. With samples consisting of all firm-year observations from 1963 to 1990 with returns data on the CRSP NYSE/AMEX Monthly files and respective accounting data on the COMPUSTAT Annual Industrial and Research files, he formulates and tests four major hypotheses to find evidence for his predictions. At first he chracterizes “conservatism in accounting as the more timely recognition in earnings of bad news regarding future cash flows than good news”.1 In his first hypothesis he predicts a more sensitive response of earnings towards bad news in comparison to good news, proxied by negative and positve annual stock returns. His second prediction is that earnings are more timely than cash flow, indicating a stronger association of accruals to conservative accounting effects. Hypotheses three and four account for a test on the

ACC307 INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT TASK 1: Contemporary Issues of Accounting Theory Fair Value Measurement Overview After the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) released the IFRS 13 Fair Value Measurement in May 2011 for the purpose of completing its joint project with the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) on fair value, the Australian Accounting Standard Board (AASB) released the Australian equivalent - AASB 13 Fair Value Measurement in the September of the same year. This standard permitted early adoption but generally started to take effect for the financial reporting periods beginning from 1 January 2013. This new standard requires no new requirement for the adoption and but it was accompanied with the issuing of AASB 2011-8 Amendments to Australian Accounting Standards arising from the AASB 13 which has made consequential changes to 32 standards and 9 interpretations for the adoption in Australia. The new standard attempts to unify IFRS and US GAAP by specifying how entities should apply the fair value measurements that applied in previous IFRS standards. It clarifies and redefines fair value as “the price that would be received to sell an asset or paid to transfer a liability in an orderly transaction between market participants at the measurement date”, sometimes referred to as an “exit price”. It also sets out a single source guidance for a robust measurement framework to ensure that the requirements are applied consistently and have clear

(BESSONG, 2012) Study the importance of historical value and fair value cost accounting on reported profit. The study discussed how fair value accounting and historical cost accounting will have effect on the reported profit. However it is said that key objective of any business is to earn profit and it is also equally important to report the profit. Especially it is more important to record profit carefully during inflationary period. However they have study the reported profit and effects of fair and historical value by collecting data from both primary and secondary source. Therefore it is found that historical and fair value both is equally important and both have significant effect on the reported profit. Therefore operating profit of the company is influenced by the amount that is paid for taxes, dividend and depreciation.