IFRS 2 Share Based Payments has never been a popular accounting standard with many in the business community. It’s also often unpopular with students, especially the deferred tax elements of it.  This is despite the fact that share based payments often provide an opportunity for easy marks (we promise!) The reason given for finance directors’ [...]

Classic Russian novels are famous for being somewhat large. My copy of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” weighs in at 1,024 pages.  That is a big book. Some day, I will get beyond page 20. Dostoyevski’s “Crime and Punishment” is 448 pages.  I’m up to page 25 on that one. According to a recent survey by [...]

BSkyB is the largest broadcaster in the UK, reporting a profit of £11.7 million on revenues of £5.9 billion in its most recent financial statements. Its ownership structure is dominated by News Corporation, the transnational media conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch, whose other ventures include numerous newspapers and Fox studios in the USA. It’s fair [...]

After a long wait and a fair bit of speculation, rumour and expectation, we accountants now know who the next chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board is going to be. Now, this might not sound quite as exciting as we’d like to make it sound, but this really is very significant.  When a new [...]

Last week one of the top policemen in the UK admitted to getting discounted flights for his family by using air miles obtained on tax payer funded flights. John Yates, who is the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (i.e. the  Greater London Police), is entitled to fly business class on official trips abroad. This [...]

BP chief executive Tony Hayward was grilled yesterday by the US Congressional panel. The failure of the Deepwater Horizon drilling platform has been a catastrophe for lots of people. Stakeholders ranging from individual fishermen through to major shareholders have all been severely impacted. Being natural accountants though, we couldn’t help but think how this would [...]

It seems that a certain volcano in Iceland is going off again. At the time of writing, a number of UK airports have had to close because of drifting volcanic ash. This, it seems, is likely to be an ongoing problem, especially for more northern European countries. I have a flight booked in a couple [...]

The troubled US airline industry is going through a period of consolidation.  Consolidation in the sense of companies getting together to reduce their fixed costs per transaction, not consolidation in the sense of producing group accounts. This article, however, is about group accounts.  The circumstances of the Continental/ United merger do make it look like [...]

Graham Holt, the examiner for ACCA paper P2, has long stated that he wishes P2 to remain a “cutting edge” paper.  This means that he is fond of testing new accounting standards, especially those that are controversial.  We at ExP think that this is both appropriate and fair. We’ve been asked by a number of [...]

I just read that Royal Caribbean have recently entered the World’s largest passenger ship – the Oasis of the Seas – into service.  It is enormous, with elevators to carry passengers up and down the 18 passenger decks.  To my old fashioned tastes, it looks rather like a floating housing estate, but I think that’s [...]