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Securities and Exchange Commission
[Release Nos. 33-8040; 34-45149; FR-60]Agency: Securities and Exchange Commission Action: Cautionary Advice Regarding Disclosure About Critical Accounting Policies Summary: The Securities and Exchange Commission is issuing a statement regarding the selection and disclosure by public companies of critical accounting policies and practices. For Further Information Contact: Robert A. Bayless, Special Assistant to the Chief Accountant, 202-942-4400.
Supplementary Information:As public companies undertake to prepare and file required annual reports with us, we wish to remind management, auditors, audit committees, and their advisors that the selection and application of the company's accounting policies must be appropriately reasoned. They should be aware also that investors increasingly demand full transparency of accounting policies and their effects. Reported financial position and results often imply a degree of precision, continuity and certainty that can be belied by rapid changes in the financial and operating environment that produced those measures. As a result, even a technically accurate application of generally accepted accounting principles ("GAAP") may nonetheless fail to communicate important information if it is not accompanied by appropriate and clear analytic disclosures to facilitate an investor's understanding of the company's financial status, and the possibility, likelihood and implication of changes in the financial and operating status. Of course, public companies should be mindful of existing disclosure requirements in GAAP and our rules. Accounting standards require information in financial statements about the accounting principles and methods used and the risks and uncertainties inherent in significant estimates.1 Our rules governing Management's Discussion and Analysis ("MD&A") currently require disclosure about trends, events or uncertainties known to management that would have a material impact on reported financial information.2 We have observed that disclosure responsive to these requirements could be enhanced. For example, environmental and operational trends, events and uncertainties typically are identified in MD&A, but the implications of those uncertainties for the methods, assumptions and estimates used for recurring and pervasive accounting measurements are not always addressed. Communication between investors and public companies could be improved if management explained in MD&A the interplay of specific uncertainties with accounting measurements in the financial statements. We intend to consider new rules during the coming year to elicit more precise disclosures about the accounting policies that management believes are most "critical" - that is, they are both most important to the portrayal of the company's financial condition and results, and they require management's most difficult, subjective or complex judgments, often as a result of the need to make estimates about the effect of matters that are inherently uncertain. Even before new rules are considered, however, we believe it is appropriate to alert companies to the need for greater investor awareness of the sensitivity of financial statements to the methods, assumptions, and estimates underlying their preparation. We encourage public companies to include in their MD&A this year full explanations, in plain English, of their "critical accounting policies," the judgments and uncertainties affecting the application of those policies, and the likelihood that materially different amounts would be reported under different conditions or using different assumptions. The objective of this disclosure is consistent with the objective of MD&A. Investors may lose confidence in a company's management and financial statements if sudden changes in its financial condition and results occur, but were not preceded by disclosures about the susceptibility of reported amounts to change, including rapid change. To minimize such a loss of confidence, we are alerting public companies to the importance of employing a disclosure regimen along the following lines:
By the Commission.
Dated: December 12, 2001
http://www.sec.gov/rules/other/33-8040.htm
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