Advanced Topics in Financial Reporting

Catalog description

This course is designed to enhance students' understanding of global financial reporting. The course begins by establishing the concepts underlying financial reporting and then focuses on advanced financial reporting topics such as revenue recognition, tax reporting, long-term liabilities (e.g., leasing contracts and bonds), intercompany investments, Mergers and Acquisitions, and corporate divestitures. The goal of the course is to make students informed issuers or users of financial reporting information. Issuers (i.e., firm's management) seek to communicate to users (e.g., analysts, investors, and creditors) information about their firm's performance and future prospects. Users seek to understand the implications of financial information for the firm's current and future prospects. The course focuses on understanding the mapping between underlying economic events and the information in financial statements and on how this mapping affects inferences about the economic activities and financial information reported by the firm. Because managers seek to communicate to financial statement users through financial statements and developing financial reporting information requires the exercise of considerable judgment, users seek to understand the financial information reported by issuers. The course is useful for anyone who wants to have a deep knowledge of the implications of relying on the information from financial reports such as investment bankers, restructuring and turnaround specialists, private equity professionals, corporate development/internal M&A professionals and entrepreneurs. This course is also useful for C-level roles (CEO, CFO, SVPs/GMs) and for those who want to serve on boards of major corporations as it provides an executive viewpoint on financial reporting and investor messaging implications for complex transactions.