Apparently SEC chief accountant James Kroeker does not appreciate the AICPA’s disapproval of the FAF’s new proposal to set up a Private Company Standards Improvement Council, calling the disapproval “a clear threat to the independence of the FAF.”
Accounting Today has the entire story but the short version is that Kroeker went off at Monday’s Standard & Poor’s Accounting Hot Topics Conference in New York, calling the AICPA’s resolution “egregious.”
In case you forgot, at last month’s fall meeting of AICPA Governing Council, members overwhelmingly approved a resolution that sent the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF) a strong message: either FAF moves to adopt the Blue Ribbon Panel on Standard Setting for Private Companies’ (the Panel) recommendations for a separate board— which is the AICPA’s preference— or the AICPA will consider other options.
At that time, the AICPA made it clear that if FAF continued to pursue its current proposal, the AICPA board of directors would look at other solutions for addressing the needs of private companies. This could include creating a separate standard setting body to develop private company generally accepted accounting principles (PCGAAP) or a comprehensive private company-specific basis of accounting that would deliver meaningful, lasting improvement to private company financial reporting consistent with the Panel’s recommendations.
Maybe Kroeker should go hang with the AICPA and cuddle up to watch the upcoming webcasts that outline FAF’s proposal?
We’re not sure why Kroeker is so butthurt, nor why he would dare take on 350,000 CPAs by calling their wishes “egregious” but that’s a different matter entirely.
