preview

Going Concern

Good Essays

Going Concern in a Credit Crisis – Call for Your Views Steve Priddy Director of Technical Policy and Research October 2008 You can comment on this piece at http://discuss.accaglobal.com/view_topic.php?id=49&forum_id=62

One of the fundamental accounting concepts is that financial statements are prepared on a going concern basis – that is that there is an underlying assumption that the entity will continue in operational existence for the foreseeable future and that the entity has neither the intention nor the need to liquidate or curtail materially the scale of its operations. The generally recognised alternative to the going concern basis is to assume that the business will be broken up. This may significantly diminish the carrying …show more content…

But such forecasts are not in the public domain – they form part of the management accounting of the organisation. What we do have in the public domain in addition to the P&L and Balance Sheet is the Cash Flow Statement (CFS). Over the years of developing regulation and standard setting, the CFS has been sadly neglected. As a result it is perhaps less well understood and used. For example, a large group of companies which entered administration in September 2008 and whose financial statements were approved by the Directors in May 2008 showed a positive increase in cash in the 12 months to 31 October 2007 of £24.2m. So, perhaps the organisation was adversely affected in the year following. But inspection of that increase shows that there was actually a net cash outflow of £15.0m, dominated by an outflow of £46.5m on acquisitions and disposals. The positive increase was only achieved by Management of liquid resources of £20.4m and Financing of £18.8m. And further explanation of the Management of liquid resources shows that this was achieved by reducing sums on bank deposit, and Financing primarily by Loans drawn down. In other words the ability of the group to generate free cash from trading activities seems to be illusory and should have put any user of the financial statements on guard. In my opinion the FRC update does not say enough about cash and cash flow generation. But the update is welcomed. It is clear that more

Get Access