Disagreements in revenue recognition, or: a billion bricks!

A recent financial reporting oddity from Zimbabwe… The company in question is WestProp Holdings Limited, an entity “on a mission to create a brighter future for Zimbabwe by developing properties in our lifestyle communities where people can live, work, shop and play.” As far as I could tell, the company hasn’t made (and presumably isn’t…

Restatements on the rise, or: screened out!

Block Journal (among various other sources) recently published the following: We looked at the Macy’s instance here, and subsequent reporting seems to confirm that it’s something of a peculiarity. As reported by NBC News: “The (responsible) employee told investigators that a mistake was initially made in accounting for small parcel delivery expenses, and then the…

The SEC in the age of Trump, or: into the wood chipper?

Few people would have been surprised that the US Securities and Exchange Commission is backing away from its previously-passed (but now never to be implemented) climate disclosure rules… …but recent events must raise questions about what else lies ahead for the organization. Recent reporting by The Economic Times sets out some initial Trump-era developments: Beyond…

More on the public interest, or: outside the tent?

I recently mused here on the often-cited concept of the “public interest”… I say “recently” because it wasn’t even two weeks ago, but the post already almost seems like a missive from a simpler and more naïve age, given Trump’s rampaging destructiveness since then. The following is from a Globe and Mail column by Adrienne…

More on IFRS 18, or: didn’t we do this already?

Let’s return to IFRS 18, Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements… We already looked at an entity’s assessment of its “main business activities,” relevant to determining whether certain expenses which would otherwise be classified as investing or financing activities should rather be viewed as operating activities. More broadly, the operating category of expenses includes all…

Serving the public interest…and other underexamined concepts…

This is from the page on CPA Canada’s website titled “Advocacy: In support of the public interest”: That’s a fairly focused, discipline-specific concept of the public interest. But browsing the website further, I was struck by the following phrase, included in the description of a podcast episode: “Public interest” is, clearly, among the more malleable…

DEI in retreat, or: put back that piece of pie!

It’s telling that two of Canada’s major newspapers published very similar opinion pieces  within a couple of days of each other.… This is from the piece headlined Canada must stand firm on DEI as U.S. corporations retreat, written by Wes Hall and Walied Soliman, published in the Globe and Mail: In the Toronto Star, Ruby…

IFRS 18: if you want MPMs, we’re the MVP!

Let’s return to the upcoming IFRS 18, Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements… Another key aspect of the new standard is its treatment of management-defined performance measures (MPMs), subtotals of income and expense that aren’t specifically required to be presented or disclosed under IFRS, but that an entity uses in public communications outside financial statements,…