Английский язык для экономистов - Малюга Е.Н.
ISBN 5-469-00341-8
Скачать (прямая ссылка):
This may sound worryingly uncertain, but it might be better than trying to rely on a brittle illusion of accounting exactitude, which is liable to collapse during times of economic strain. For the moment though, the efforts of regulators and standard-setters are focused on five main areas:
Pro-forma accounts. These are the first sets of results produced by companies in America: they are unaudited and do not follow America's GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). In the years of the stockmarket bubble they were shamelessly abused. Companies regularly reported huge profits in their pro-forma earnings statements, only to register even larger losses in their official filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Since the end of March this year, companies have been compelled to show how they reconcile their pro-forma figures with the numbers subsequently produced according to GAAP rules, of which there are hundreds.
Off-balance-sheet vehicles. These include the "special-purpose entities" made famous by Enron, which gave them the names of suitably fanciful characters in the Star Wars movies. They allowed the Houston oil trader to hide hundreds of millions of dollars of liabilities from investors' eyes. 104
Английский ЯЗЫК ДЛЯ экономистов
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (F^ASB), America's private-sector standard-setter, issued guidance on these vehicles in January, which Ford and General Motors say will have a material impact on their profits this year. But some think that the new rules are weak because they allow exemptions for "Qualifyingv special-purpose entities.
Stock options. Most significant of all, perhaps, is the attempt to force companies to account for stock options granted to their employees. This week, FASB agreed that the cost of employee stock options should be treated as an expense. The question is, how to value them. The standard-setters may yet have a fight on their hands. In 1994, Congress threatened to take away FASB's standard-setting powers if it did not abandon its attempt to make companies "expense" their stock options. Opposition is gathering once more, although this time recent accounting scandals should lend support to FASB's position.
Pension funds. Another controversial aim is to make companies change the way they account for their employee pension schemes. Britain's new standard on pensions, FRS17, forces them to measure pension assets at market value. In future, if a company's pension fund owes its members more than it owns in assets, the difference will be shown on the balance sheet. Outside Britain, such gaps can be smoothed out over years, with the result that some companies are still recording profits from their pension schemes despite the fact that the schemes themselves are in deficit. Britain's approach will spread: in March, FASB said it would start examining ways to improve accounting for employee pension plans, with the aim of publishing a new standard on pension accounting in America next year.
Revenue recognition. This is the vexed issue of when precisely to include revenue in the accounts — for example, when an order is made, when it is shipped, or when payment is received. Revenue recognition has been the main reason for restatements of accounts by American companies in recent years. Sir David Tweedie, chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) in London, and his equivalents around the world want to lay down new rules on when a company can recognize revenue. Again, the effect could be far-reaching: companies could be made to look far smaller if they are prevented from pulling revenue forward from future periods, as many do now.
Future Standards
Standard-setters hope that today's mood of financial conservatism will allow them to tighten up other areas of accounting too. For example, Sir David wants all leases — contracts in which a company is committed to Unit 6. Accounting
105
pay for the use of an asset over a long period of time — to be recorded on companies' balance sheets as debt. The result would be to make balance sheets larger and debt ratios higher.
Yet another goal is to shift the world's body of accounting standards away from rules (the approach favoured in America) towards principles (more influential in Britain). The hard rules embedded in America's GAAP have helped devious financiers to design structures that obey the letter of the law but ignore the spirit.
But Bob Herz, the new chairman of FASB, is not optimistic about his ability to move GAAP towards principles and away from rules. Because companies and auditors demand certainty in America's litigious market place, the most he can do, he says, is to steer somewhere in between the two approaches.
Clamour for reform began in the 1990s. As share prices soared, people pointed to the growing gap between the book value of companies (what appeared in their accounts) and their market capitalization (valued on stock exchanges) as evidence of the irrelevance of accounts. The way to make them more relevant (and to stop executives from fiddling them) is, standard-setters believe, to force companies to value more of their assets and liabilities at market prices, to "mark them to market."
