International act and the International Accounting Compare current reporting practices between a company that reports under IFRS in the United States and a U.S. GAAP company that also files in the U.S.
I would like each group to find one company that files IFRS based financial statements with the SEC. You are suggested the following search strategies:
1. Searching the public press for any talk about filing IFRS financial in the U.S.
2. Identify a handful of foreign companies who do business in the United States and see if they report to the SEC by going to www.SEC.gov and searching the company database for the company of interest. Download their 10-K filing and examine footnote 1 on accounting policies. I expect that footnote to identify what form of accounting method is used. (The audit opinion will likely also state the method.)
3. Compare the company performance through the market/industry index in (10, 5 and 1 year).
Based on the financial reports and other disclosures found at the SEC web-site or the web-sites of companies in the following industries, each assigned group should choose one of the IFRS companies listed and then find another company that files under U.S. GAAP in the same industry for review. You may use Compact Disclosure in the Business Library or yahoo.com to find other companies in the same industry.
Groups Companies
Walmart / Tesco PLC
Merck/ GlaxoSmithKline
Motorola/Nokia
Hershey / Cadbury
Royal Dutch Shell / Exxon
Daimler AG / Ford
Required:
The companies’ reporting practices should be compared and contrasted paying specific attention to at least two areas where US GAAP and IFRS potentially differ for the two companies. You may also want to observe interesting industry reporting practices in general (e.g., use of leases, importance of R&D, intangible assets, fair values, etc.) Also, feel free to document or comment on any reporting practices that you feel are innovative and/or deficient. Ideally, you should form some type of opinion about the relative reporting quality of the two companies in comparison to each other.
Report format:
1- executive summery
2- introduction ( what is the paper about, main objective of the paper , company background, some history of company, organizational structure and its industry and market descriptions) around 2 pages
3-lit review ( the usage of wall mart Gaap and IFRS )
4-interpertation / analysis the main thing (comparisons)
5- conclusion
6- references
