In: Finance
IC6-3
Towers Inc. (TI) is a leader in delivering communications technology that powers global commerce and secures the world's most critical information. Its shares trade on the Canadian and U.S. national stock exchanges. The company had been experiencing unprecedented growth, but then, in 2015, industry demand for the company's services and products declined dramatically due to an industry realignment, an economic downturn, and a tightening in global capital and product markets. By the end of 2017, the industry stabilized and the company began to enter a turnaround period after significant downsizing.
In 2017, employee morale was very low because of all the downsizing. Many employees were being actively recruited away from TI. Management decided to set up bonus programs for employees who stayed to see the company through the difficult times and back to profitability. Under one plan, every employee would receive a bonus in the first quarter that the company achieved enough profit to cover the bonus costs. In order to help achieve profitability, the CFO met with the managers of his divisions and established profitability targets and what he referred to as “roadmaps” that showed how these targets could be achieved. The roadmaps included statements that the profits could only be achieved through the release from the statement of financial position of excess provisions (that is, provisions for obsolete inventory and bad debts). The provisions had been overprovided for in earlier years in an effort to “manage” profits.
In 2018, the company came under scrutiny from the securities regulators. The government notified it of a criminal investigation into alleged accounting irregularities. In addition, there were several class-action lawsuits outstanding against the company by shareholders alleging that TI had provided misleading information to them in the financial statements for 2016 and 2017. Once news of this was released, credit-rating agencies significantly downgraded their ratings of TI's securities. As a result of this negative activity, the company had not released its financial statements for 2018 and was now in breach of stock exchange requirements to file financial statements. Although the stock exchanges had not done so, they now had the power to delist TI's shares.
The controller of TI must now finalize the financial statements and has come across the following information.
Instructions
Adopt the role of controller and analyze the financial reporting issues.
As a controller following financial reporting issues can be found:-
1)Since TI's core operation going to be closed in early 2019 the revenue and costs of these should be separated and net gains/losses from these operation to be shown as Gain/Loss from Discontinuing Operations.
2)Since TI has started new segment business of selling optical products the activities from these segment needs to be separately disclosed as per Segment Reporting Standards.This should not be merged with reporting of main activities of TI.
3)As it has Purchased subsidiary, the excess consideration paid in relation to the investment in subsidiary needs to be disclosed separately as Goodwill by comparing with the net assets of the subsidiary at the time of acquisition.And at the end of reporting period along with the Stand alone Financial statements of TI,a consolidated financial statement of TI and DEF Inc. needs to be prepared.
4)Notes to the financial statements should also disclose TI's current nature of business,the Holding-Subsidiary relationship,new segment business,the details of legal cases pending against the organisation and details of penalty imposed if any.