The New York Times recently published a piece titled Dilemma on Wall Street: Short-Term Gain or Climate Benefit? It’s written by Lydia DePillis. Here are some extracts: The article notes that “it’s difficult to steer a portfolio to climate-friendly assets while other funds take on polluting companies and reap short-term profits for impatient clients…. without…

As we discussed here, in March 2024 the IASB published for comment the Exposure Draft Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment. As we previously covered, the exposure draft rejected some of the more ambitious ideas mooted in the past, such as reintroducing amortization of goodwill, focusing instead on fine-tuning the methodology for impairment testing and introducing additional…

As a special warm weather treat, it’s time now for another in our long-running series of extracts from real-life tweets (as they used to be called – I suppose I should now say “posts on X,” or some comparable absurdity) that made some mention of IFRS, presented here in their original form, all oddity and…

You’ll recall that following amendments to IAS 1 in 2022, an entity classifies a liability as current when, among other things, it does not have the right at the end of the reporting period to defer settlement of the liability for at least twelve months after the reporting period. The standard specifies that if the right to defer…

Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published, on the same day, a couple of interestingly contrasting opinion pieces. The first, titled Small companies risk buckling under the burdens of mandatory sustainability reporting, was by Andrew McLaughlin. Here are some extracts: The second article, titled How many LGBTQ+ corporate directors does Canada have? We investigated, was by…

The Canadian Accounting Hall of Fame announces its 2024 inductees! There are eight of them, six of whom are still with us. This is perhaps the most distinctive of the eight summarized bios: The other seven inductees are I’m sure no less worthy, although in a more conventional vein (I worked a bit with one…

With his “Let’s Stay Connected” address to the European Accounting Association Annual Congress, Andreas Barckow delivers one of the all-time most interesting speeches by an IASB Chair. Rather like identifying the world’s largest gnat, you say? Not at all! I’ll devote the entire space today to some extracts: The closing thought of Barckow’s thoughtful and…

Let’s take another look at the report published by the University of Sheffield’s Audit Reform Lab, titled Reward for failure: The paradox of audit partners’ record payouts amidst poor audit quality. These are some of its recommendations: The report doesn’t specifically suggest how the client-pays model should be reformed or replaced (some have suggested, for…

As we addressed here, IASB recently issued the exposure draft Contracts for Renewable Energy. We already looked at the proposals relating to applying the ‘own-use’ requirements. The exposure draft also addresses the IFRS 9 hedge accounting requirements, noting that application challenges arise in designating and measuring the hedged item if a contract for renewable electricity…

Auditors failed to raise alarm before 75% of UK corporate collapses, announced the title of a recent Financial Times article. Here’s some of what the article, written by Simon Foy, had to say: The article concludes by quoting the report as follows: “Until the culture of audit is reformed and a new and more effective…