ANTHONY H. CATANACH JR. is an associate professor in the School of Business at Villanova University, as well as the Cary M. Maguire Fellow at the American College Center for Ethics in Financial Services. His professional experience includes five years as an audit manager with KPMG and six years in the financial services industry. Dr. Catanach has received numerous awards for his publication, teaching, and curriculum innovation efforts. He has authored numerous articles on a variety of accounting, finance, and management issues, as well as several business education texts..
Recently, we enjoyed a wonderful article titled “Buyers Beware: The Goodwill Games,” by Scott Thurm who discussed an interesting rubric by which to evaluate goodwill’s value: the ratio of a company’s goodwill to the total entity’s market value. Thurm seems to suggest that companies whose goodwill exceeds market capitalization may be prime candidates for future write-downs. Very interesting indeed, especially as goodwill is such a queer asset (see Goodwill Games). Continue reading »
Sep 172012
As you may recall, we previously discussed problems in government pension accounting (see “California Budget Woes and Chimerical Pension Beliefs: GASB Could Help if it Had the Will”). In this essay we turn our attention to corporate pension accounting, pension expense specifically, using Weyerhaeuser disclosures as an example. Continue reading »
Monday September 10 Groupon named a new Chief Accounting Officer, Brian Stevens, formerly a partner with KPMG. The question, of course, is whether this move is enough to save face with the investment community, after the many fiascos we have discussed, such as our “Still Accounting Challenged” and “First 10-K.” Continue reading »
Ever since Enron and WorldCom entered the social discourse ten years ago, much has been written and discussed about business ethics, and this of course includes how to teach ethics to accountants. And quite frankly, the plethora of on-line ethics courses makes our skin crawl! And unfortunately, much of this ethics training has been targeted to accounting students. All too often it can best be characterized as vague, foundationless, uninspiring, and inconsequential. Continue reading »
Zynga is back in the news with disappointing results. The Company’s second quarter results were announced on July 25 with a loss and slowing revenue growth. Several law firms responded in our great American tradition by announcing class-action suits. Continue reading »
J. EDWARD KETZ is an associate professor of accounting in the Smeal College of Business at Pennsylvania State University. He has a bachelor’s degree in political science, a master’s degree in accountancy, and a Ph.D., all from Virginia Tech. Professor Ketz has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 1981. He also has taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Maryland. Professor Ketz has authored and edited 17 books including Hidden Financial Risk (Wiley, 2003) which examines the corporate culture and the institutional setting that engendered recent accounting scandals. Dr. Ketz has been cited in the popular and business press, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Business Week, and USA Today. He also has appeared as an accounting commentator on CNN, National Public Radio, and Bloomberg Radio.