Accounting

Essay by EssaySwap ContributorUniversity, Master's February 2008

download word file, 9 pages 0.0

Stock options are employee compensation. Why then aren't these costs recognized in income statements? By C. Terry Grant, CPA and Conrad Ciccotello Everywhere, people are talking about accounting.

We can?t remember another time when there?s been more discourse about the lack of quality and transparency in corporate financial reporting than today. And it isn?t only the usual crowd of investors, legislators, regulators, journalists, lobbyists, bankers, accountants, and corporate financial managers. Even Jay Leno is satirizing accountants.

The clamor for change continues to get louder. Investors are hammering stocks of companies whose earnings are suspect. Yet when it comes to stock options, an increasingly popular form of employee compensation, companies still let this cost go unrecognized, and thereby distort their financial statements. It?s a serious problem for anyone who believes in the integrity of our capital markets and the efficiency of capital allocation.

But you can?t lay total blame on accounting rule makers for the stock options accounting subterfuge that companies continue to finesse.

A GAP IN GAAP For the last decade the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has tried to issue accounting rules for stock options that would help make financial statements more transparent but has been stymied politically. As a result, the FASB issued a compromise: Statement of Financial Accounting Standards (SFAS) No. 123, ?Accounting for Stock-Based Compensation.? Unfortunately, this scaled-back standard only recommends, but doesn?t require, that companies charge the fair value of options as a compensation expense to operating income. And few companies do. Instead, they follow SFAS No. 123?s alternative of disclosing in a footnote what net income would have been if the value of employee stock options had been booked as a compensation expense. If companies were compelled to recognize this expense, it would be quite noticeable: Net income of nearly one-quarter of the...