The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) recently issued a joint exposure draft on accounting for leases. This exposure draft seeks to shift lease accounting from an “ownership” model to a “right-to-use” model. Under the...

Standard setters and most academics maintain that accounting standards ought to rest on a set of guiding principles stated explicitly in a “conceptual framework.” The FASB and IASB are currently involved in a project to refine conceptual framework documents developed earlier. At this point,...

We examine four key conceptual tensions that are at the heart of many financial reporting dilemmas: stocks vs. flows, ex-ante vs. ex post, conventions vs. economic substance, and top-down design vs. bottom-up evolution as sources of accounting practice. Associated with each of these conceptual...

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a call for comment on a proposal to adopt a Roadmap for potential use of international financial reporting standards (IFRS) by U.S. Companies. We comment on five key issues raised by the SEC proposal. First, we propose that the need for a...

This paper addresses the issues that confront the FASB and IASB in developing a new conceptual framework document. First, we suggest characteristics that a conceptual framework ought to exhibit. Most of these suggestions are based on our critique of the existing framework and the FASB-IASB work...

The SEC has proposed a strategic plan which sets out its mission, vision, and values, identifies four strategic goals, a set of desired outcomes associated with each strategic goal, and a list of performance measures for assessing the SEC's effectiveness in attaining its goals. We affirm the...