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Financial reporting is the best method for the firm to report the economic condition of the company to the external entities such as creditor, employees, shareholders and customers. All the organizations prepare these statements with an aim to provide financial information of the firm to the users, so that it becomes easy for them to determine the financial health of the company which will help them in decision making. Earlier different firms adopted different techniques of accounting and reporting to present their monetary data, but due to globalization it became necessary for all the companies to adopt a standard way of reporting and accounting which can be understood by all. In order to achieve this objective, Generally Accepted Accounting Principle and International accounting Standards were formulated. The main aim behind the formulation of International Accounting Standards was to make accounting and reporting of financial statement more transparent so that external parties can understand them easily and can compare them with the financial information of other organizations (Altamuro, Beatty, and Weber, 2005).
The first case is about Bristol Myers Squibb Co. (BMS) which is a multi-national pharmaceutical company. In 2004, Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) levied a penalty of USD 150 million against BMS as the company was involved in extreme earnings management technique like “stuff the channel” and “cookie jar”. According to the SEC, the company has adopted fraudulent ways for inflating its sales and earnings in order to meet the forecast made by the analyst. The first section will analyze why companies go for such kind of accounting activities such as “stuffing the channel” and “cookie jar” and will evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques for both short term and long term point of view.
Before getting into earnings management, let’s first be clear about the term earnings. Earnings are the profit made by the company during the financial year. It is only the earnings of the company which makes the stock attractive or unattractive in the eyes of investors. Poor earnings of the firm may result in a fall in share price of the company. Thus, the earnings of the company play a very important role in deciding the share price of the firm. In order to make the stock attractive, companies and managers adopt the technique called earnings management (Cohen and Eli, 2009). The managers use earning management techniques to manipulate the actual earnings of the company so as to match them with the forecasted figures of the company or analysts. The main aim of the managers behind adopting the earnings management techniques is to smooth the income of the company. That is, it does not matter whether the company is having good or bad earnings for years; by using these technique companies’ tries to manipulate the sales and earnings figure so as to maintain it near about a particular level and eliminating the fluctuations. The organizations achieve this by either adding or deducting the cash in their reserve accounts. This is known as “cookie jar” (Caylor, 2010). Below are the main reasons stating the purpose for which the manager uses extreme earnings management techniques:
Impairment of the asset can be defined as a rapid fall in the fair price of the asset due to some damage occurred to it or it has become obsolescent. If it happens to fixed assets, the company has to show the decreased value machine in the balance sheet and has to report loss in the profit and loss account. Or in other terms, it can be said that an impairment loss on any assets occurs when the reported amount of the asset exceed its fair amount which in reality is not possible for the company to recover. The impairment loss can be calculated by subtracting the fair value of the asset by the asset’s carrying amount. The impairment loss reduces the carrying amount of the assets so it is advisable to charge depreciation on the assets to adjust the carrying amount (McNichols, 2002). Below are the certain circumstances which results in impairment of assets:
Apart from the above stated circumstances, other possibilities which will result in impairment loss are:
When Vodafone conducted its impairment review, it was found there it is suffering due to volatility in its earnings. In 2005-06 it was found out that the company has written off £23.5 billion in its goodwill due to European operations. Because of the impairment loss the company suffered a loss of £21.8 billion in 2005-06, as compared to a profit of £6.5 billion made by the company in 2004-05.
Same was the case with the PSA Peugeot Citroen. When the company conducted the impairment review, it was found that there is a significant difference between the equity value reported by the company in the balance sheet and the economic value of the future discounted cash flow of its equity. The difference gave rise to the depreciation of around €3,888 million. Although this depreciation amount did not impact the operational cash flow of the company but it substantially reduced the net income of the company in 2012 (Impairment of Assets, n.d).
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After working on the above report it can be concluded that it is very important the companies to follow GAAP and international accounting principle in order to standardize its financial statements. Further, the companies must try to avoid the fraudulent practices for reaping short term benefits.
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