Assignment - Review of Current Accounting Issues

Task -

In your accounting career you will be required to analyse current accounting issues and communicate your theoretical understanding to your professional colleagues and your clients. For this assignment assume that you are the senior accountant working for a major firm.

Question 1 -

The CEO has forwarded to you an interesting article and requires you to provide her with a deeper theoretical understanding of the issues discussed so that she can fully engage in the lively discourse at an upcoming conference.

You are required to find a newspaper article or web page report of an item of accounting news, i.e. it refers to a current event, consideration, comment or decision that has been published after the 1st of June 2016. Your article could also come from one of the professional journals. The article should not come from an academic journal. Academic journals generally do not contain news articles or articles of less than one page and are usually only published 2 or 4 times a year. If you are having a problem ensuring that your article is from an appropriate source contact your subject coordinator.

You then need to explain the article that you have found in your own words and clearly relate the concepts, ideas and facts within the article to one or more of the theories or topics that you have studied this session. Support your analysis of the assumptions and implications of the topic or theory as appropriate with reference to sources in APA 6 style. For example, this article  from the Sydney Morning Herald in April could be linked to the topics of accounting regulation and measurement (and perhaps others). You must provide a copy of the article or web page, with details of the source, date and page number with your answer.

Question 2 -

The Senior Partner of the firm you work for has appointed you to a new role. It is now your responsibility to review upcoming accounting standards and provide a report to the partners on the proposed standard and the opinions of other industry players on the changes.

Firstly, you are required to find a current exposure draft or proposal for a new accounting standard which has been opened for public comments. (These can be found on the websites of most standard-setting organisations, such as the IASB, AASB and FASB. Hint: These websites can be quite difficult to navigate, so as a first step try typing "IASB exposure draft and comment letters"/"FASB exposure draft and comment letters" into Google or other search engine of your choice). Read a sample of the comments from a range of respondents. Select four respondents, ideally from different types of organisations for example, from accounting bodies, industry, companies or corporate bodies. If you are having a problem finding suitable comments letters then contact your subject coordinator.

In your own words, supporting your evaluation with appropriate citations, appropriately referenced in APA 6 style, you are required to include the following information in the report.

a) Introduce the major issues in the new standard

b) Explain if there is generally a consensus or if there is disagreement between the commenting parties. Examine in detail why some parties may have a dissenting point of view.

c) Analyse the assumptions behind public interest, private interest and capture theories and evaluate which one best explains each of the comment letters.

Please note: you need to attach the comment letters you selected for your report (there is no need to attach the exposure draft)

Rationale - This assessment is designed to test your ability to:

• communicate your understanding of the topic areas; and
• be able to critically evaluate selected current financial reporting and management accounting issues.