AICPA tells House subcommittee new financial reporting model offers investors better information.

• Position: News update

Barry C. Melancon, the AICPA's president and chief executive officer, testified in Mar. before Congress on the need for a new financial reporting model that gets more quality information into the hands of investors faster, thereby enabling them to make informed decisions based on current, rather than only historical, results. He described the foundation that the CPA profession has laid to achieve this goal.

Melancon told a hearing of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government Sponsored Enterprises that corporate reporting of financial information via quarterly and annual reports is historically based.

"Today, investors, lenders and other users of the information need to make decisions much faster and more often based on what is currently happening and what may happen in the future, in addition to what has occurred solely in the past," he said.

The AICPA has worked for more than a decade to achieve enhanced financial reporting, Melancon said. In 1993, a report by the AICPA Special Committee on Financial Reporting was one of the first to call for a broader "bandwidth" of information from public companies to provide more useful information to investors.

"Enhanced financial reporting is no longer just a dream," said...