The Corporate Reporting Dialogue – a major rebalancing?

I somehow stumbled onto the website of the “Corporate Reporting Dialogue,” “an initiative designed to respond to market calls for greater coherence, consistency and comparability between corporate reporting frameworks, standards and related requirements.” It was spawned under the umbrella of the broad Integrated Reporting initiative, which seeks to work toward “a concise communication about how…

Equity accounting – time to say goodbye?

The endless oddity of one of the long-standing aspects of financial reporting On my old blog (now sadly wiped from cyberspace), I devoted several entries to the mechanics of equity accounting, not because I really wanted to, but because the topic generates so many head-scratching oddities (like the one I discussed last time). This is how I put…

Less than zero – oddities of the equity method

I’ll return another day to the basic question of why we’re stuck with equity accounting, a practice that doesn’t really make much conceptual sense. But for as long as we’re stuck with it, it generates plenty of head-scratching opportunities. Take for example the situation where an investor’s share of losses in the associate or joint…