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Expense Recognition Red Flags: Capitalizing vs. Expensing 2.4
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來自 University of Pennsylvania 的課程
会计分析
1623 個評分
從本節課中
Earnings Management
This week we are going to examine "earnings management", which is the practice of trying to intentionally bias financial statements to look better than they really should look. Beginning with an overview of earnings management, we’ll cover means, motive, and opportunity: how managers actually make their earnings look better, their incentives for manipulating earnings, and how they get away with it. Then, we will investigate red flags for two different forms of revenue manipulation. Manipulating earnings through aggressive revenue recognition practices is the most common reason that companies get in trouble with government regulators for their accounting practices. Next, we will discuss red flags for manipulating earnings through aggressive expense recognition practices, which is the second most common reason that companies get in trouble for their accounting practices. By the end of this module, you’ll know how to spot earnings management and get a more accurate picture of earnings, so that you’ll be able to catch some bad guys in finance reporting!
與講師見面
Brian J BusheeThe Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor
Accounting
Christopher D. IttnerEY Professor of Accounting
Accounting
>> Hello, I'm Professor Brian Bushee.
Welcome back.
In this video,
we're gonna start to take a look at expense manipulations in which managers
try to play with the timing of expenses in order to manipulate their earnings.
We're gonna take a look at capitalization versus expensing immediately.
These are situations where a company has some kind of big cash cost this period and
they can either expense it all right away or they could capitalize it into an asset
and then amortize the expense over time to try to smooth out the expense.
Let's get started.
Before we get into the capitalization versus expense immediately,
let's do a quick review of expenses.
So expenses are decreases in net income,
not necessarily cash that arise in the process of generating revenues.
We recognize expenses when either the related revenues are recognized,
these are product costs.
Cost that become expenses when we sell the product or service.
So this technically shows up as cost, if its sold on the income statement.
Or they're recognized when incurred, if they're difficult to match with revenues.
These are period costs the selling, general and administrative costs.
So, all the other costs of running a business.
Many expense related manipulations create a huge gap between expenses and
cash flows and we can see part of this on the balance sheet,
because there's gonna be accounts for these capitalized costs.
Basically, storing up these costs until they hit the income statement.
And there's also gonna be reserve accounts,
which we'll talk about next video.
We're gonna take a look at the Statement of Cash Flows where we can see the gap
between net income and cash from operations that's caused by expense
related manipulations and about 35% of SEC
enforcement actions are related to questions around recognition of expenses.
So this is a big deal also.
So we're gonna look at this question of capitalization versus
expensing immediately.
Capitalization means the company creates an asset when the cash is paid and
then amortizes it or expenses it over time.
The alternative is to just recognize an expense when cash is paid and so
this is the choice that companies's managers have to make.
>> My sister once told me that the rules are quite explicit about whether
a company may capitalize a cost or not.
>> Your sister is exactly right, the standard setters have created a lot of
explicit guidance on how expenditures must be treated.
For example, research and development and
advertising has to be expensed immediately, but there's still are a lot
of these expenditures where the rules provide discretion.
For example, whether something is maintenance or
a capital improvement, whether it's a software development cost before or
after something called technological feasibility.
And then companies will occasionally have these customer acquisition costs,
where the guidance is not clear on whether it should be capitalized or
expensed immediately.
So there's still a lot of expenditures where managers have the room to make these
determinations on when you expense something.
Let's look at an example to see how this works.
So let's say, a company spends $120 in 2016 on software development costs and
this is one area where managers have some discretion of whether to capitalize or
expense immediately.
And let's say that costs have a three-year benefit for
generating revenue, so whatever software you're developing
should help you make sales over the next three years.
If the company capitalizes, then in 2016 as they pay 120 cash,
they would create an asset called deferred software development costs.
And then in 2016, 2017 and 2018 at the end of the year,
they would recognize an expense of 40 and reduce the asset by 40.
So they're spreading those costs over three years.
If they expense immediately, then in 2016 as they pay the cash,
they would recognize an expense of 120 and
there would be no expense the next 2 years.
So the more the company capitalizes,
the smaller its expense will be in the first year.
Once you decide to capitalize,
then the question is what do you do with amortization periods?
Now, these should reflect the period over which costs will help generate revenues.
So we saw the example of a three year life where we spread the cost over three years.
If the manager decided to lengthen the period, it would reduce expenses in
the early years, but it would add more years of expense.
So let's say, you decided to do four years instead.
What it does in the first three years is reduce your expense by 10 from
40 down to 30, but then give you an extra expense of 30 in 2019.
Shortening the periods with increase expenses, but
then resolved in fewer years of expense.
So if the company did a two-year life,
then their expenses would be higher in those first two years.
They would have 60 instead of 40, so an extra 20 of expense, but
then there would be no expense after 2017.
So by choosing the amortization period,
the manager can essentially choose how they spread this expense over time and
what the level of their expense would be in the current year.
>> Seriously?
There must be a law that says, how long you can amortize something.
>> If not, you could change the period every year,
depending on whether you wanted higher or lower earnings.
>> No, there is no law that says the exact number of
years that you have to use to amortize a given asset.
Instead, what the rules say is that you should amortized it over its useful life,
which means how long the asset is gonna generate revenue?
So how long, in this case,
these capitalize costs will help you produce revenue?
That is context specific, it differs based on firms, it differs based on assets.
So there can't be a law that centralizes this, but that doesn't mean you could
change your assumptions for the number of periods each and every year.
To change your period, you have to justify to your auditor why circumstances have
changed, which would call for a different useful life and
the auditor will probably let you get away with that once.
But then if you come back the next year and wanna change it again and
then try to change it again and again and again, the auditor will probably say no.
So you get maybe one opportunity to change the amortization period and
the auditor will be okay, but the auditor is there to prevent the company from
changing these periods every single year.
Here are the red flags we're gonna use to look for aggressive capitalization or
amortization behavior.
So look at the ratio of the deferred cost assets to total assets.
So, are these assets getting bigger?
If so, the company's capitalizing more costs.
The ratio of amortization expense to revenue.
Is this ratio getting smaller?
If so, the company's spreading out the amortization over more
periods to reduce the expense.
The average amortization period.
So we can calculate something called months amortization,
which is the average asset balance divided by amortization expense times 12.
So this is similar to the day receivable days inventory ratios that we looked at
earlier, except here we are looking at months.
The gap between net income and cash flow, because these capitalization, amortization
strategies create a bigger gap between net income and cash from operations.
And we can calculate what the company's net income would be,
if they expensed immediately.
So that is gonna be equal to the net income that they report,
which reflects the capitalization, amortization.
We'll add back the amortization expense that removes it from net income.
We'll subtract the cash cost.
Because if the company was expensing immediately, the cash cost would be
the expense for the year and then we have to subtract a tax adjustment.
And the tax adjustment is just the difference between the amortization
expense and the cause cost times whatever the companies tax rate is.
>> Dude, why do you need a tax adjustment?
I like it better when we like ignore taxes.
>> I like ignoring taxes, as well.
But unfortunately, we can't ignore taxes in this situation.
The problem is that net income is an after tax number, but
the amortization expense and the cash costs are pretax.
So we need to include a tax adjustment to figure out what's the tax effect of
changing the expense.
We can include that tax effect with the pretax and the expense.
Add that to net income and we get net income, if we expensed immediately.
Now, let's practice applying these red flags in a case.
The case we're going to look at is Dog Nutrition Associates,
they're a custom dog food provider.
Customers use saliva swabs to collect the dog's DNA and
then they send the results to the company.
The company then, custom crafts the food to the dog's DNA profile and
sends the food to the customers weekly.
The company aggressively markets its product by sending free DNA kits in
the mail to people, regardless of whether they requested them or not.
And the hope is that people will decide to use this free DNA kit and
then become subscribers to the weekly dog food service.
>> My gosh, this company cannot be real.
>> You don't remember their commercials where they would use cute kids to try to
promote their product?
Here, I think I have a clip from one.
>> Is your dog not eating right or not as energetic anymore?
Try our specially formulated dog food, using our free doggie DNA kit.
It will be sent by mail to your home.
Send your dog's DNA sample to the Dog Nutrition Associates or the DNA, so we can
craft the perfect dog food that is both nutritious and delicious for your dog.
All it takes is a lick or a cheek swab.
After you mail the DNA, every week, you will receive a specially made dog
food with an ingredient list on what goes into the food.
It only costs as little as 29.99 a week.
It is the small price to pay for the best nutrients for your dog.
For more information, go to our website dna.aol.com and
keep watching for your kit today.
>> So the company had it's initial Public Offering in 2011 and
had to file 10-K with SEC at that point.
The accounting guidance was not clear about whether the marketing cost for
the DNA kits had to be expensed immediately.
Regular advertising, all the other marketing expenditures did have to be
expensed immediately, but there was no guidance that was specific to DNA kits.
So the company decided to capitalize these as Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs
and amortize them over the expected period they would generate revenue.
The expected average period was 12 months.
Let's take a look at the spreadsheet where I've summarized the financial statements
for Dog Nutrition Associates.
If you look at their balance sheet, here you can see
the Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs, which are growing over the two years.
If you look at the income statement, you won't see the amortization of these costs
anywhere, because they're included within costs of revenues.
So the only place that we can find the amount of these costs is on the cash flow
statement.
They report amortization of subscriber acquisition costs, because it's a non
cash expense that has to be added back to net income to get cash from operations.
And what we can also see here is the net income for the company has been growing,
3 million, 7 million.
But if we look at their cash provided by operations,
it actually has dropped between 2011 and 2012.
Now we can take a look at some of these ratios.
So Deferred Subscriber Acquisition cost to total assets has grown from 17% to 21%,
so they're capitalizing cost at a higher rate.
If we look at the expenses as a percent of revenues, it's gone down overall.
And we see the amortization period has dropped slightly,
although that's probably just measurement error as the company grows.
It looks like on average, it's 10 or 11 months,
which is close to the 12 months the company says that it uses.
I showed you before the gap between that income and cash from operations,
it's growing over time and then we can calculate net income if the expense
immediately where we take net income.
We add back the expense.
We subtract the cash payed for Deferred Subscriber Acquisition cost and
where we can find those is on the cash flow statement.
There's a line for Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs.
Here's the amount of cash they're spending, we can add those.
Well, actually, subtract those in this equation to the tax adjustment and
we can see that if they expense immediately that have net income that was
negative and declining overtime.
Analysts and investors were disappointed by mixed results in 2012, whereas revenue
was up 350%, net income was flat and cash from operations was negative as we saw.
At the start of FY2013, the company changed its amortization policy based on
changes in subscriber experience data.
It turned out customers were maintaining food subscriptions longer than expected.
And so now,
they would amortize Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs over 24 months.
Let's take a look at how that would affect their results in 2013.
I have added the 2013 results to the spreadsheet.
We can see that the Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs asset continues to grow.
We can also see that revenues have grown substantially, huge increase in 2013.
We see that net income is also up substantially from 7 to 30 million.
We see the big increase in subscriber acquisition cost expense that
is being advertised and a huge increase in the amount of cash costs
spent to send out these DNA kits and the cash operations is negative and declining.
So let's take a look at the ratios.
Now the Deferred Subscriber Acquisitions cost asset is 40% of total assets,
so they're capitalizing an enormous amount of these costs.
The expense has dropped from 14 to 11% of revenue.
And if we do the month's amortization, we can see the evidence that they
length of amortization period has gone from 10 to 18 months.
If we look at the gap between the incoming cash flow as we saw, it's widening and
then what would their net income look like if they expensed immediately?
Well, we add back the amortization, subtract out the cost that they're
spending during the year on these DNA kits, adjust for taxes and
they have a huge loss.
So by capitalizing and
amortizing, the company is showing steadily increasing net income.
If they're expensing immediately, they'd show a steadily decreasing net loss.
Analysts and
investors were starting to notice what we were noticing in the ratios and
they started to criticize the company's capitalization policy during 2014 So,
the company decided to switch to expensing immediately in the middle of the year.
Basically, they caved into the demands of these analysts and investors and
they wrote off all of their Deferred Subscriber Acquisition costs in 2014.
>> Why would the company cave into the demands of these nefarious analysts?
>> Excellent question.
So when a company is growing rapidly, it's better off capitalizing and
amortizing and that's because the expense from the cash outlays is much greater
than what the expense would be if you capitalize it and
smooth it over time with the amortizing.
But when a company's growth slows down, the situation actually reverses.
The amortization expense, which represents the past cash outlays can get bigger
than what the expense would be if you just did it based on current cash outlays and
that's a situation the company's gotten into.
It's realized that it's growth has slowed and
it's gonna be stuck now with these huge amortization expenses going forward.
So, it takes advantage of the controversy to write off this asset.
The asset disappears, which means it no longer has to worry about those
amortization expenses off into the future.
Instead, it will just expense immediately when it spends cash.
And in doing so, actually have higher earnings than if they capitalized and
amortized into the future.
So if we bring up the spreadsheet one more time,
I've added 2014 column to the spreadsheet and
what we can see is the Deferred Subscriber Acquisition cost asset goes away.
So at the end of 2014 at zero, they've written it off,
they've gotten rid of all those deferred costs.
If we look at the income statement, we see the revenues are still growing.
They have a $500 million net loss, but that's because they wrote off that
entire deferred subscriber acquisition cost asset at once and
it was $385 million when they decided to write it off.
So that's $385 million of future expenses that they will no longer have to
recognize, because they put it all in this period.
In on the cash flow statement, you could see it's added back as a non-cash expense.
There was a little bit of amortization and Deferred Subscriber Acquisition cash cost
reported, that's from the part of the year before they change their policy.
After they change their policy, you no longer going to see these two line items,
because all the expense is gonna be cash just be included in net income and
cash from operations.
And hey, notice cash from operations has turned around and become positive.
If we look at the ratios, the ratios don't make any sense anymore,
because they've changed their policy.
Now we can't compare the ratios across time anymore,
because it's a different accounting regime.
But what we can see is if they expensed immediately,
they still would have had a drop in net income, because they are still growing and
they still have these huge costs of sending out the DNA kit.
Now for those of you that have been googling Dog Nutrition Associates
to sign up for their service, this is a made up company, but
it is based on a real company, which I'm not gonna tell you who it is.
But the only way the real company got out of this mess was they,
basically, used their inflated stock price to make a big acquisition, get
into a different business and then they were able to carry on from this point.
That wraps our look at capitalizing versus expensing immediately.
It's a very easy way that managers can play with the timing of their expenses to
smooth out their earnings, but it's also a way that's a little bit easy to spot.
What were gonna take a look at in the next video are some expense
manipulations that are more difficult to find,
because they involve reserve accounts that are buried deep into the footnotes.
I'll see you then.
>> See you next video.
