The FASB itself is working on a "conceptual framework" of accounting--sort of an accounting constitution.
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No wonder, too, that high-tech companies and venture capitalists are fighting the FASB tooth and nail.
FASB, is drafting rules that would require companies to consolidate operations that they, in effect, control.
Consider two others: FASB Statement 8, say big multinationals, necessitates inefficient currency hedging to dampen earnings fluctuations.
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The FASB's hope is that the "hit" to a company's reported earnings would effectively kill the device.
Sadly, Congress likely won't override the FASB for fear of being painted as a tool of scandal-ridden corporations.
Even now it is waging a rear-guard action to undo the easing that the FASB promulgated in April.
The FASB has yet to produce proposals on financial assets and is more wedded to a fair-value regime.
But the FASB ruled that currency fluctuations are part of today's economic reality, so they should be reflected immediately.
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FASB's controlling board of trustees comes from industry groups and its funds from audit firms, industry and financial groups.
FASB's initiative would have created difficulties for companies that rely on such entities.
Businesses thought the FASB had quietly dropped the matter, but it had not.
On April 2nd, after a bruising encounter with Congress, America's Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) rushed through rule changes.
This action by the FASB was "a complete abdication of responsibility, " Carmichael says.
But the FASB ruled that they should be expensed immediately, because their future value is too subjective to judge reliably.
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Meanwhile, FASB has fiddled with the accounting rules so much that, as one of America's most dynamic business executives, T.
But FASB's biggest crime against the economy and the American people came when it decided to measure the impossible: options expensing.
FASB, would hand the responsibility for its funding to the Treasury, which would levy compulsory fees on companies and accounting firms.
In the meantime, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) clarified the rules and gave banks, in particular, a potential defense.
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An example is the FASB's recent Statement 13 on accounting for leases.
FORBES: Why Everybody's Jumping On The Accountants These Days
The FASB has received a tiny number of letters supporting its proposals.
Finally, FASB made market-to-market accounting a regulatory capital requirement in November 2007.
Congressional pressure eventually caused FASB (the Financial Accounting Standards Board) to relax slightly their rules on mark to market accounting as applied to banks.
That's when the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) is expected to let companies that acquire others expense the goodwill, rather than amortize it.
Or take the FASB's Statement 2, which requires companies to deduct research and development expenditures from income in the period in which they are made.
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"It's hard to tell in advance what effect a principle will have, " says the FASB's scholarly vice chairman, Robert Sprouse, a former Stanford University professor.
FORBES: Why Everybody's Jumping On The Accountants These Days
Logic would dictate that, but logic is not the FASB's motivator.
FASB, which in the case of Enron's off-balance-sheet entities required consolidation.
FASB's efforts to have employees' share options treated as an expense.
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