Handbook of Accounting Standards

Current authoritative accounting standards are codified online at asc.fasb.org and auditing standards are codified at aicpa.org. Standards of accounting are most often issued in response to business cycles and especially accounting failures. You can now go straight to the codified accounting standards that are up to date. Why not ignore this book? The matter of how standards have changed will help you understand the current standards.Constant evolution in accounting standards calls for constant vigilance. Just a mere forty year span of a career as an accountant creates a chance to observe an amazing evolution up to today. In this handbook I work back in time from my own career observations to 1900. Our college accounting professors in the 1960s emphasized that a contributing factor in the 1929 stock market collapse had been “anything goes accounting” and that thereafter the 1934 securities laws, particularly Rule 10b(5)redefining the crime of fraud as including a mere inadvertent omission of a material fact, had accelerated professional accounting standard setting. This book will take you back to the accounting controversies in business failures even before that great depression and will cite legal cases as far back as the year 1900. We will work back in time so this book starts with selected observations from my career observations. I include with comments from interviews of accountants who are heroes and are approaching one hundred years of age including my interview with one while he was in the hospital in 2013. During this period over forty bulletins came from the Accounting Research Board (ARB) followed by sixteen opinions of the successor Accounting Principles Board (APB). A particularly thorny accounting method, pooling of interests, was the topic of my graduate school thesis (appendix of this handbook.) This is the case study I have chosen to show as an example of how accounting standards changed and evolved. The Accounting Principles Board had to split the pooling pronouncement into two opinions to get the required number of votes. Arthur Andersen threatened to sue the Board if pooling was banned. If good marriages are pooling of interests why aren’t good mergers of businesses pooling of interests? Do you think marriage is a pooling of interests? Ask your spouse after a dose of truth serum. Ask the same question of a bride with a large dowry of priceless art and then ask the same question to her husband who has outstanding debts, court judgments and student loans. Will you get their attention? I know that readers now will say “oh, the couple will have lawyers to craft artful trusts, partitions and prenuptials. But assume we are not accounting separately for all these worthily created and masterfully designed separate legal entities; and that we want to present economic truth of the married couple together as an entity. So now imagine that you have asked a few further questions, “What is your combined balance sheet?”, “What is your net worth?” and “What values should you use for the art and the court judgments?” The fog sets in when we define an entity for accounting purposes. Think about the Unites States of America’s balance sheet that omits s Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Obama care et. Seq. Oh yes, you will think that cloud computing enables us to see all. Go look at the word cloud. It is a synonym for confused, for obscured, and for fog. Read this handbook for a clear view of accounting standards in general by looking at pooling that was not used, then was used without a standard, then was optional, then limited by a standard, and finally banned by the current standard.