AccountancyIQ: the treasure trove!

I came across a relatively new blog, AccountancyIQ, written by Nasir Uddin, a teacher of accounting and auditing: The blog teases the following… …and might actually be capable of delivering on that. Uddin is a strikingly elegant writer (much more so than the quasi-hack you’re reading at the moment), often expressing himself with an almost…

Be true and fair! (It’s easy, right?)

I came across a highly interesting recent think-piece written by Colin Mayer, entitled ESG is Dead, Be True and Fair Instead Here are some extracts: In part, that points toward the limitations of current accounting and reporting standards, for example in not recognizing certain categories of intangible assets and related costs. Mayer doesn’t dwell on…

On the virtue of simplicity, or: grabbed in the fist and squeezed!

An interesting article in Canadian Accountant ponders Why accountants should spend less time on the numbers and more time explaining the results. Written by Philip Maguire, it notes that “The combination of historical and current valuation requirements in the balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flows have resulted in financial statements that are…

Disclosures on artificial intelligence, or: tone shift!

The Ontario Securities Commission recently released staff research that analyzes the frequency and sentiment of Canadian listed issuers’ references to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their financial disclosures. Here’s how the OSC’s news release summed it up: As indicated above, one of the more interesting aspects of the exercise is that it itself made use of AI: The…

Next on the Trumpian agenda: down with the audit?

We recently looked at the current moves in the United States toward eliminating the audit regulator, the Public Company Auditing Oversight Board… And as if that wasn’t enough, Francine McKenna recently posted the following on LinkedIn: She harked back to something she’d written in January 2019: Although one might react to that with intuitive horror,…