Warren Buffett invests in Canada, but should you?, asks a recent New York Times column Here’s how it starts off: When Warren Buffett acts, investors notice. And after he took a roughly $300 million position last month in Home Capital Group, a troubled Canadian mortgage underwriter, some investors saw it as a vote of confidence not only in that…
The US SEC has filed charges against the Canadian entity Penn West Petroleum Ltd. (now renamed Obsidian Energy Ltd.) and three former senior accounting and finance personnel alleging violations of the antifraud, recordkeeping, internal controls, and reporting provisions of the federal securities laws arising from a multi-year accounting fraud. Penn West prepared the financial statements…
Once or twice a year since I started writing this blog, I’ve periodically posted some real-life tweets which made reference to IFRS in one way or another (most recently here). This has been very obviously a light-hearted exercise, and I’ve made it pretty clear several times that I don’t see Twitter as having much practical…
On the University of Oxford business law blog, I came across a summary of a recent review of academic literature about IFRS adoption. Here’s the synopsis provided there: “If we had to summarize the development of the IFRS literature, the majority of early studies paint IFRS as bringing significant benefits to adopting firms and countries…
“Investors Worry Revenue Rules Will Allow Earnings Manipulation” announces a recent article on the Bloomberg BNA website. Here are some extracts from the article, written by Steve Burkholder: Some investors worry that revenue accounting rules that public companies must begin using in January will yield inconsistent reporting and allow earnings manipulation, according to Bloomberg BNA…
A European example of challenges in applying one of the more complex aspects of IAS 39 Here’s another of the issues arising from extracts of enforcement decisions issued in the past by the European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) (for more background see here); this is from their 19th edition: “The entity has entered into several…
Should deferred tax be abandoned, basically? It’s not uncommon of course to come across complaints that the concepts underlying deferred tax balances are hard to follow, that the resulting assets and liabilities don’t mean much to users, and so forth. I suppose I’ve always taken a fairly standard view towards that issue, as I put…
IFRIC has issued IFRIC 23, Uncertainty over Income Tax Treatments. It took a while – I wrote about the draft version over a year and a half ago. An uncertain tax treatment for purposes of the interpretation is one “for which there is uncertainty over whether the relevant taxation authority will accept the tax treatment…
I wouldn’t ever have watched Ben Affleck’s film The Accountant… …except that I thought it might provide some material for a blog post (given my self-imposed pace of a new 800-word update every five days, I’m always looking for material). After all, as has been observed in the past, accountants are only minimally represented in Hollywood…
Thoughts on a recent speech by IASB Chair Hans Hoogervorst Titled The IASB and Integrated Reporting, it didn’t initially make much impact on me. But then a recent column by Robert Bruce made me think again. Here’s part of what Bruce says: Fifteen years ago it was felt…that the concepts of management commentary were not central…
John Hughes IFRS Blog 