This may come as shock to some of you but mark-to-market accounting is unpopular. And when we say unpopular, we don’t mean your nerdy brother-unpopular, we’re talking George W. Bush-unpopular. Now before you go apeshit about “reality” and “economic cycles” will share some results with you from a survey provided by Valuation Research Corporation and then you can engage in your the steel-cage death dork match.
• According to the survey, 58% of respondents believe that market turmoil negates Fair Value Accounting’s validity
• Those who believed FVA was flawed and potentially not valid during market turmoil, almost 34% suggested a temporary return to historical cost accounting as an alternative
• Regarding Level 3 Assets: A full 44% believed the bank values were within an accuracy of 10% and another 40% thought those values were as much as 30% off.
• Regarding Level 3 Assets: Thirty-six percent believed hedge fund and private equity values were only within an accuracy of 10% and a full 49% thought those values were as much as 30% off.
• Respondents were split when asked if mark-to-market should be suspended for the purposes of bank regulatory capital with 50% believing it should be and 50% believing it should not be.
So the take away seems to be that MTM doesn’t work and is pretty much not legit when the shit hits the fan, everyone trying to value Level 3 assets is using a dartboard, and nobody knows how to fix the problem.
Definitely interesting results but if anyone says, “Barney Frank knew what he was talking about”, projectile vomiting is going ensue.
Survey – No Confidence in Fair Value.pdf
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Crowe Horwath Sticks to Their Guns and Gets Fired
Crowe Horwath either has some shrewd auditors working there or they need to work on their people skills because First Place Financial Corp. just kicked their asses to the curb over irreconcilable differences.
The whole thing came down to the “material weakness” versus “significant deficiency” debate you auditors love so much.
More, after the jump
On September 1, 2009, Crowe notified the Company that it was its opinion that the Company had not maintained effective internal control over financial reporting as of June 30, 2009. This was in contrast to Management’s opinion that it had maintained effective internal control over financial reporting as of June 30, 2009. After subsequent discussions, the disagreement remained. The essence of the disagreement concerns a single internal control weakness which resulted in an error in valuing loans held for sale as of June 30, 2009. Crowe determined that this internal control weakness was a material weakness while the Company determined that this internal control weakness was a significant deficiency.
The shitty control in question missed an error that overstated loans held for sale by $2.17 million and understated the net loss for fiscal 2009 by $1.41 million. Crowe said that this was cause for the material weakness and First said nonsense poopy-pants, it’s not material, so it’s a significant deficiency.
Well, it was obviously mule vs. mule because First Place’s audit committee ultimately decided that firing Crowe on Tuesday was the best course of action.
Maybe First Place are the assholes. WTFK, really? Whatever the problems, KPMG gets the pleasure now. If you’ve got any further information on this one, want discuss MW/SD (vomit) or just feel like speculating, discuss in the comments.
First Place Details Disagreement with Auditor [Business Journal Daily]
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