Thread regarding General Electric Co. layoffs

GE Chair of Audit Committee, Leslie Seidman, was known during the 2008 bubble and aftermath of regulations as "Loophole Leslie."

No wonder GE hired her... She is there to add extra loopholes for GE in the accounting and protect the company not necessarily do what is right for the shareholders, pensioners and employees.

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bankrules-weakening/

Leslie Seidman – a FASB member known to some of her critics as “Loophole Leslie” for her advocacy of bank-friendly accounting rules.

https://blogs.wsj.com/cfo/2013/06/05/fasbs-seidman-americans-prefer-rules-to-principles/

FASB’s Seidman: Americans Prefer Rules to Principles

By Emily Chasan
Jun 5, 2013 4:39 pm ET
0 RESPONSES
Outgoing Financial Accounting Standards Board Chairman Leslie Seidman has had plenty of time to tackle long-standing questions about whether accounting principles are more desirable than specific accounting rules.

The debate over whether detailed rules and bright-line exceptions are more or less useful than broad principles that require management judgment has dominated her past ten years on the board as the FASB has been working to harmonize key accounting rules with the London-based International Accounting Standards Board.

ZUMA PRESS Leslie Seidman, Chairman of the Financial Accounting Standards Board.
“I think it’s undeniable that we Americans like our rules,” Ms. Seidman said at a Financial Executives International conference in New York on Tuesday, where she was discussing the accounting rulemakers’ soon-to-be-completed joint project on revenue recognition accounting. She made the comments in her final public speech as chairman of the U.S. accounting rulemaker.

She leaves the board when her term for service is completed in July. Ms. Seidman was named chairman of the FASB in 2010 in the middle of her second-term as a FASB board member. A former FASB staff member and accounting executive at J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Ms. Seidman has been a FASB board member since 2003.

International rules are designed to be principles-based, and accounting professionals often mention how U.S. generally accepted accounting principles include about 25,000 pages of rules, compared to a couple thousand pages in International Financial Reporting Standards. Ms. Seidman said there are deep cultural roots in America’s preference for rules, and pointed to golf history as evidence.

“The first chairman of the USGA [United States Golf Association] formed a committee to try and interpret the rules of golf,” Ms. Seidman said, citing a quote from the group in 1897. “’We find in America it’s necessary to have the rules more clearly defined as Americans are inclined to play more by the letter than the spirit,’” Ms. Seidman quoted from an article, spurring a roar of laughter from the audience.

While that was well before the current debate over rules and principles, she said the American preference for specific rules is something accounting rulemakers will continue to navigate, and have faced in the recent accounting standard setting process for revenue recognition rules.

“It was not surprising to me that the letters we received over the course of this project from U.S. stakeholders said we need more guidance and more examples, whereas the letters from people in the rest of the world said that we have gone too far and we should have a more principles-based standard with not so many examples and not so much guidance,” Ms. Seidman said.

She said at last count the board’s final standard, which is expected in September, will contain about 50 examples. Those examples “will of course not answer every question,” Ms. Seidman said. “But we think they will be representative of the major types of transactions and issues that you’ll encounter.”

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ACCOUNTING CONVERGENCE GOLF LESLIE SEIDMAN

Seidman doesn't know? Head of the audit committee, former head of FASB and nobody told her about non GAAP treatment? It's her job to know, to ask, to ensure the integrity of the process. If she doesn't know, she needs to shut up publicly.

Advice for her and Culp, and others speaking from the GE bubble today having learned exactly nothing from the experience, courtesy Robert Burns in 1786:

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An' foolish notion:
What airs in dress an' gait wad lea'e us,
An' ev'n devotion!

standard English translation available in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ToaLouse

Leslie Seidman is a good person. I really do not think she knows what's behind all of this.

Based on the report by the Madoff whistle blower there is $38 billion dollar in losses the company has been hiding. Worse than Enron?