The Shadow Financial Regulatory Committee urges theSEC to adopt a rule as soon as possible and no later than April 30, 2008 that will give all issuers a choice between using IFRSor U.S. GAAP for their financial statements.

There is clearly a current and growing need for information that supplements conventional GAAP financial statements.

Reform focused on sustainable lending would have FHA target a projected average claim rate of 5 per 100 insured loans under normal circumstances and 10 per 100 insured loans under stress circumstances.  This rate is about five times the normal default level for prime loans and about half the FHA's traditional default level under normal circumstances.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is an accounting system that relies primarily on cost to establish balance sheet values. This works well when hitched to a depreciation system that reduces the value of assets as they are used up or made obsolete. But how should companies account for financial assets...

U.S. adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), has been sidelined by the financial crisis, but deserves more attention.  Both issues illustrate the perils of political interference in financial reporting and in the process of professional standard setting.

The Enron scandal has raised questions about the quality of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that are at the foundation of the accounting system in use in the United States. Meanwhile, the SEC’s insistence that GAAP is superior to the International Accounting Standards (IAS) used in Europe...

While GAAP is required of everybody else, the Federal Reserve banks choose to follow their own special accounting rules created by the Federal Reserve itself.

In recent years, accountants have begun to recognize that financial statements prepared under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) cannot adequately communicate the value of companies that use internally generated intangible assets--such as software or pharmaceutical designs--to produce their revenues and profits. Since 80 percent of the value of the...