What’s New in Financial Reporting: Financial Statement Notes from Annual Reports

©January 2008, 147 pages

This study provides disclosures selected from 2006 annual reports to illustrate how companies addressed accounting issues recently promulgated by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We selected specific accounting issues based on a review of recent pronouncements by the FASB, comment letters issued by the SEC, and other trends that appeared as we reviewed 2006 annual reports. Our report focuses most on four accounting areas where we found considerable variation in disclosures: (1) Commitments and contingencies, (2) Derivatives and financial instruments, (3) Goodwill and intangibles, and (4) Revenue recognition. We selected disclosures that used innovative techniques to clearly address difficult accounting issues, avoiding “boilerplate” disclosures that provide little company-specific information. Financial executives can use this report in two ways: as a quick update of recent trends, or as a reference tool for dealing with challenging reporting issues. We have posted all financial statement footnotes gathered for this study on the Financial Executives International website at: http://www.financialexecutives.org/EWEB/dynamicpage.aspx?site=_fei&webcode=edg_home