Updated handout on searching Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) Literature

Some Acc 3000 students, and others, have assignments which involve searching and locating answers to various factual problems by using the Financial Accounting Standards Boards literature. (Some might refer to this as the FARS assignment, "FARS" being the Financial Accounting Research System CD from the FASB of which we have two copies at the reference desk. For most of the students, this is their first introduction to the literature.

I have updated a handout that I prepared for Prof. Ethan Kinory's class last night and I have placed some copies in the reference desk files under Accounting 3000 FASB assignment.

Sources for the FASB literature include:
Print copies, the FARS disk, the free FASB website, www.fasb.org, and the subscription databases RIA Checkpoint and CCH Accounting Research Manager.

To search the accounting literature on RIA Checkpoint, after logging on, the search box needs to be changed to Acctg, Auditing & Corp. Finance.

CCH Accounting Research Manager offers the FASB literature and explanations and interpretations.

We have limited concurrent users for RIA and CCH but I think these are the better choices to use.

What parts of the literature should the students search? The problems are set in the current time, so I suggest that they start with the Current Text.

The Current Text has two parts, general standards applicable to all industries unless the industry has specific industry standards (the second part of the current text). Industries that have specific standards are oil & gas, motion pictures, etc. The Current Text is arranged by subject/topic and incorporates current applicable information from the FASB standards, which may have been amended, and other FASB publications. It provides references (hyperlinked to) to the FASB standards and other publications.

Because the Current Text is not officially part of Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, students should not cite the Current Text but to the official standard. This is done by number and paragraph. It is likely that a number of searches may be necessary.



The assignments are trying to do at least four things: Help students recognize issues from a factual situation, search a database, find information and apply that information to the situation, and resolve the issue(s) in the assignment. The new Uniform CPA Exam requires that students retrieve FASB literature to answer some problems on the exam.

The CCH Accounting Research Manager Interpretations and Explanations might provide very useful help to students. The handout also includes mentions of CCH Business & Finance that offers a GAAP Guide, and Lexis-Nexis that offers the Miller GAAP Guide, and Books 24x7 offers a number of books that might be helpful in providing background explanations.