Should they? Yes. Will they? No.
One of the fundamental principles of accounting is a concept called
'consistency'. That is to say, if you consistently apply principles,
you have a much higher level of understandability, comparability and,
of course, consistency.
In the context of the stock market, you may have companies applying a
variety of perfectly acceptable accounting techniques (to the FASB),
while innocent investors and analysts are fumbling to analyze
financial results from company to company. You really have to read
the fine print (notes to the financial statements) to understand which
principles 'are' being applied. They set the company's financials
side by side and try to make a decision on which is the better
investment. But now the whole process is unnecessarily complicated by
the 'well which princples are they using (for revenue recognition, for
example), and you can easily see the difficulty.
I think in their desire to make things easy, they make things
difficult. Look at how "Stock Based Compensation" is handled, as an
example. This thing is over 100 pages of technical material that if
you asked 100 accountants to calculate it, I'll bet dollars to
doughnuts that no two would calculate it the same. Here's the Black
Scholes model, which is what this calculation is all about. I've done
accounting for 20 years. I'll bet I can't figure it out with any more
accuracy than you.=(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes
My 2 cents. |
