American Accounting Association’s Financial Accounting
Standards Committee (AAA FASC)
James A. Ohlson, Stephen H. Penman, Yuri Biondi, Robert J. Bloomfield,
Jonathan C. Glover, Karim Jamal, and Eiko Tsujiyama
SYNOPSIS: This paper proposes an accounting for revenues as an alternative to the
proposals currently being aired by the FASB and IASB. Existing revenue recognition
rules are vague, resulting in messy application, so the Boards are seeking a remedy.
However, their proposals replace the traditional criteria—revenue is recognized when it
is both ‘‘realized or realizable’’ and ‘‘earned’’—with similarly vague notions that require
both the identification of a ‘‘performance obligation’’ and the ‘‘satisfaction’’ of a
performance obligation. Our framework aims for the concreteness that yields practical
accounting solutions. It has two features. First, revenue is recognized when a customer
makes a payment or a firm commitment to pay. Second, revenue recognition and profit
recognition are combined, with profit recognition determined on the basis of objective
criteria about the resolution of uncertainty under a contract, and then conservatively so.
Two alternative approaches are offered: the complete contract method (where profit is
recognized only on the termination of a contract) and the profit margin method (where a
profit margin is applied to recognized revenues throughout the contract as the contract
profit margin becomes clear. The latter requires resolution of uncertainty, so the
completed contract method is the default.