Financial Reporting

Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read Chapter 10: Reporting and Analyzing Liabilities, Chapter 11: Reporting and Analyzing Stockholders’ Equity in your course text. Visit the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) EDGAR | Search tools  (Links to an external site.)web page.

In an 8-to 10-page paper double-spaced paper (not including the title and reference pages) research and discuss the SEC’s company filings requirements. In your paper:

  • Describe how investors can use the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) EDGAR | Search tools  (Links to an external site.)web page to quickly research a company’s financial information filed on Forms 10-K and 10-Q.
  • Identify the differences between the Annual Report sent to shareholders and the Annual Report on Form 10-K, which must be filed with the SEC.
  • Describe the contents of the Form 10-K SEC filing include the following elements:
    • Management Discussion and Analysis
    • Auditors’ Report
    • Selected Financial Data
  • Discuss how the SEC’s requirement for domestic and foreign companies using US GAAP to provide their financial statements in the XBRL format can improve financial reporting?
  • Most publicly traded companies are examined by numerous analysts. Locate analysts’ ratings about a company of your choice by visiting a website such as Yahoo Finance (Links to an external site.). Provide a comparison over time and across companies in the same industry by answering the following questions:
    • How many analysts rated the company?
    • What are analysts predicting in terms of earnings and revenues?
    • How do the estimates compare against historical results?
    • How do the growth projections for the company compare with the average projections for the S&P 500?

The Financial Reporting and the SEC paper