Financial Reporting

The AICPA and the Big Five issue a document ( http://ftp.aicpa.org/public/download/news/risk_factor.doc ) that assesses current economic and business conditions that could hinder complete and accurate financial reporting. It offers financial statement preparers, auditors and audit committees advice on how to make their financial reports more useful to investors.

SEC Chairman Harvey L. Pitt says the commission’s division of corporation finance will monitor the annual reports Fortune 500 companies submit to the SEC in 2002. This scrutiny, Pitt says, will focus on disclosed information that seems essential to clear understanding of a company’s financial returns and outlook, but that also appears to conflict with GAAP or to be unclear or incomplete. ( www.sec.gov/news/digest/12-21.txt )

The SEC amends its rules under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 to require that, beginning in the second quarter of 2002, companies disclose in their annual reports more information about their employee stock option plans and other equity compensation agreements. ( www.sec.gov/news/headlines/comm121901mtg.htm )

At its December board meeting, FASB decided ( http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/fasb/derivatives/bdmtg121901.html ) not to make final the tentative guidance in Implementation Issue no. C13, When a Loan Commitment Is Included in the Scope of Statement no. 133. Instead, the board adopted an alternative approach requiring evaluation of loan commitments under that statement’s characteristic-based definition of a derivative.