ACCOUNTING FOR DERIVATES: BACK TO BASICS

Public accountants have had a hard time deciding how to account for derivatives that are used to hedge risks, which in turn has given derivatives users and others a hard time. For about six years, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has struggled with several, often diametrically opposed procedures, ranging from showing all derivatives at “fair” values to deferring realized losses or gains on derivatives until related gains or losses on the hedged transactions have been realized (a practice known as “hedge accounting”). What is behind the FASB's inability to come up with a decisive and authoritative ruling? Although the politics of self-interest has fueled much of the debate, there is more to the problem than politics. The author argues that the underlying cause of the FASB's inability to reach a satisfactory and acceptable solution is not politics, but rather a flawed basic concept of how financial accounting should be done. In this article, the author recommends a procedure for derivatives accounting that was endorsed by the Financial Economists Roundtable in its 1995 “Statement on Accounting Disclosure about Financial Derivative Instruments.” The proposal, in brief, is this: Provided a company can satisfy its auditors that it is using derivatives primarily to hedge an offsetting price exposure, the firm should be given the option to use hedge accounting for that part of its derivatives position that is functioning as a hedge. All other investment or speculative uses of derivatives should be treated like other financial instruments and marked to market or fair value. Such a procedure, the author argues, is far more consistent than the FASB's recent proposals with fundamental principles of accounting that have been developed by accounting practitioners and scholars over several centuries.