Nigel Finch

IFRS Compliance in the Year of the Pig: The Practice of Goodwill Impairment Testing Among Large Hong Kong Firms During 2007

Several studies have suggested that the adoption of IFRS can enhance the quality of financial reports, in turn improving their reliability and usefulness (Wyatt, 2005; Barth et al., 2008). However, such studies generally assume that the introduction of IFRS guarantees consistency and compliance in practice. Given that goodwill impairment testing under IFRS presents a technically challenging task (Hoogendoorn, 2006; Wines et al., 2007) that can materially impact the determination of economic profit, this study focuses on assessing the compliance quality of a large sample of Hong Kong firms that are mature IFRS adopters. By examining the detailed disclosures made by 264 large listed firms in 2007, three years after Hong Kong’s adoption of IFRS, an alarmingly high rate of non compliance with HKAS 36 still exists among these goodwill-intensive firms, casting doubts over the hypothesis that lax compliance is a characteristic associated solely with early adoption.

Do Hybrid Instruments Lower the Firm Cost of Capital

The issue of hybrid instruments by firms is often justified on the grounds that these instruments allow issuers to achieve a lower cost of capital than would be the case under issues of straight debt and equity. In order to assess the validity of such claims it is necessary to examine the economic impact of hybrid instruments on the issuing company. If a firm can genuinely achieve a lower cost of capital than would otherwise be the case with the issue of either straight debt or equity, we argue that this is directly linked to regulatory (reporting) arbitrage, rather than the outcome of financial synergy that arises when debt, equity and option instruments are combined to form a hybrid security. We evaluate the argument that hybrid structures lower the cost of capital from an opportunity cost and risk perspective. We focus our analysis on two main structures: convertible debt and reset preference shares.