The Lease Accounting Proposal: What Investors Say

In this post, I'll be reviewing two comment letters submitted to the FASB in response to its Discussion Paper (DP) on lease accounting* by the Investors Technical Advisory Committee (ITAC) of the FASB, and the CFA Institute Centre for Financial Market Integrity (CFA).   My original comments are here. 

The lease accounting project is a strong test of the proposition that accounting standards are capable of cutting through the camouflage of legal form to get at the underlying economics of an arrangement. In that respect, FAS 13 has been a dismal failure, with untold amounts of shareholder value being destroyed by management machinations aiming to exploit complex accounting loopholes and bright line rules lacking no conceptual basis.

Almost any new standard will be a significant improvement over FAS 13, so one of the dangers we face is setting the bar too low. For example, since FAS 13 was promulgated over 30 years ago, the field of financial management has progressed well beyond the point where precise measurement of lease value drivers is on the frontier of our knowledge. I'm not just talking about academic theorizing, either. According to the book, Real Options: A Practitioner's Guide, economic valuation of complex lease terms was first undertaken by executives at Airbus, who needed to know the true cost of the flexibility they were writing into their leases to accommodate their customers' risk preferences. That was over twenty years ago! I certainly don't consider myself to be at the cutting edge of financial modeling, but give me about a week, and I should be able to write a spreadsheet to value leased assets and lease obligations that can capture 100% of a lease's complexity for more than 90% of the leases out there.

So, given the state of the art of leasing and finance, we should be expecting a lot more from the FASB than the usual medley of incremental piecemeal improvements they are proposing. We should not just expect that: (1) the assets and liabilities arising from leasing arrangements are appropriately recognized on the balance sheet; but (2) that they should also be appropriately measured. As I will be describing, below, ITAC and CFA are pressing for (1), but are aiming far too low on (2). Ironically, given the prominence and reputation for integrity of ITAC and CFA groups, one thing that you can take to the bank is that their positions will be regarded as the upper bound on the concessions to investors that will make it into the final standard. Thus, the most to be had is recognition of leases on the balance sheet; but they will be reported as arbitrary numbers based on calculations that hearken back to the relative stone ages of financial management.

I'll now discuss some of the specific issues starting with the ones I have the least qualms about, and ending with the stuff that gets my goat.

Overall Approach to Lease Accounting

The DP proposes to eliminate operating lease accounting, with the exception of "non-core" and short-term leases. While both ITAC and CFA strongly support the elimination of operating lease accounting, they are both against the notion of a "non-core leases" category. Nobody would ever expect that lease capitalization would have to be applied to immaterial items; but whatever "non-core" is supposed to mean, it doesn't always correspond to "immaterial." It's a ridiculously silly notion, but I'll nonetheless award points to both groups for pointing that out—and doing it much more tactfully than I would have.

ITAC further adds that exempting short-term leases would be an open invitation to gaming, which surely must have been obvious to the FASB but somebody needed to mention it.

Scope of a Forthcoming Standard

Without calling out the FASB for the real reason that lessor accounting issues were deferred, CFA reluctantly accepts the FASB's decision to defer consideration of lessor accounting. The real reason for the limited scope goes something like this: 'We're already taking too much heat from financial institutions on loan accounting, so let's not mess with them any more than we have to.' ITAC, for my tastes, is being too conciliatory (perhaps trying to rebuild the bridges it has burned on IFRS and fair value?) when they state that they are content for now to focus on lessee accounting.

My own two cents — If there is any area in which balance sheet accounting standards can (and should be) symmetrical, leasing is it. If the FASB is serious about its commitment to an asset/liability view of recognition and measurement, then the only real revenue recognition issue in leasing is nothing more than how to present the changes in lease-related assets and liabilities on the income statement. I would not object to deferral of income statement presentation issues from the scope of the next major accounting standard on leases, but I'm disappointed that ITAC and CFA are not exhorting the FASB to get everyone's balance sheet right. Let the big boy lessors present their income statement any old way they want; and let's require detailed roll-forward disclosures of the changes in balance sheet amounts.

 

Measurement

Everything I have written to this point has been little more than caviling, compared to my consternation on the groups' positions regarding measurement. CFA states that discounting at the incremental borrowing rate would yield a reasonable approximation of fair value, even when there is "significant uncertainty." That's the great unsupported statement of their comment letter—probably because no support is possible.

In the years since FAS 13, alternatives to discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis have been sought and developed because one eventually had to acknowledge a truth that is exactly the opposite of what CFA claims to believe: the truth is that picking the discount rate to value contingent cash flows, and coming up with a reliable measure of the fair value** of those cash flows, is nothing more than a guessing game. Ad hoc adaptations of DCF modeling to option-ladened arrangements is so yesterday. That the FASB proposes to go back to the stone ages of financial theory is less surprising to me than learning that both CFA and ITAC are cool with it.

Here's a much more robust way to think about lease valuation. There are three categories of cash flows in leasing arrangements: (1) the unconditional rental payments to be made, (2) required payments whose amount is determined by reference to uncertain future events, and (3) optional payments. We should require that a preparer document and disaggregate the fair value of their leases by each of these components. This can only mean that options must be valued using option pricing models—i.e., nails should be driven with a hammer. Yes, not all of the cash flow elements of a lease are mutually exclusive, but modern valuation models take care of that. Disaggregation in disclosure of interrelated items is challenging, but reasonable assumptions can be made and disclosed.

As to separate measurement of options, the FASB suggests, and both CFA and ITAC don't object to, a version of DCF that truncates the expected cash flows at the "most likely lease term." Given the financial technology nearly everyone has at their disposal, it's a ludicrous suggestion. Therefore, I expect it will be embraced universally by issuers. That alone should cause CFA and ITAC to reconsider their positions.

ITAC supports the most likely lease term rule of thumb (incredibly, they elevate it to "principle" status in their comments), because it seems that everybody should be able to do it. So, not only are they proposing to pound nails with rocks instead of hammers, they don't think it's worth the effort to drive the nail flush. Who are we writing standards for? FASB ought to be thinking first of the Fortune 500, because that's the bulk of the U.S. economy. Simplistic models to accommodate smaller companies no longer make sense from a cost-benefit perspective.

CFA states that one reason they support the expected lease term approach is out of expediency: "…an acceptable alternative in the interim until the use of fair value for non-financial assets is addressed by standard setters." And when will fair value for non-financial assets be addressed by standard setters? Given the glacial pace of standard setting, and the priorities that standard setters seem to have set for themselves, I'm giving even money that we won't have a general standard on that for at least another 20 years; and 2:1 odds that it won't happen before hell freezes over.  Is that really how long the CFA is willing to wait?

The bottom line on the measurement issue is that if the FASB requires some ad hoc discounted cash flow model for measuring leases on financial statements, then one of two things are going to happen: either companies will have to measure leases twice – the approach they use for internal decision-making, and again with the FASB's stone-age approach – or companies will throw out the approach they use for internal decision making and base their decision entirely on how a lease will be portrayed in the financial statements. Neither alternative should be acceptable to CFA or ITAC.

And that brings me to my bottom line on the CFA and ITAC comment letters. Both groups are legitimately concerned about the quality of information that investors will get from a new lease accounting standard, and they evidently believe that getting leases on the balance sheet at any number is as much as they dare hope for without rocking the boat too much. However, both groups virtually ignore the potentially huge value that investors will realize if the new leasing standard leads to better decision making by managers. Assets that should be leased will be leased, and assets that should be bought will be bought. That vision can only be fully realized if lease accounting gets both recognition and measurement as right as it can be. CFA and ITAC need to hold the FASB's feet to the fire, because nobody will do it for them.

Finally, here's my message for the FASB. Elimination of operating lease accounting is a good thing; it will certainly cut into the book of business of financial engineers and lawyers who accomplish little more than helping management meet their financial reporting objectives by skirting the edges of arbitrary bright lines. But, if you choose to catapult lease measurement back to the stone ages, all you will accomplish is to invite those same advisors to adapt to a new game at shareholders' expense. You will not be pleased to eventually discover that, once again and forevermore, you will find yourself chasing your own tail to issue fresh interpretations of unprincipled rules, so as to put a stop to some of more egregious ploys; and worse, you will be pressured to issue new interpretations to widen some of the inherent loopholes in stone age valuation. In the process, your policy choices will surely destroy value for shareholders (although you will strenuously deny it).

Alternatively, you can craft a principled and perforce simple standard requiring economic valuation of leases. There will be some work to do in specifying the objectives of the measurement process, but you will actually be able to afford flexibility in the choice of models and parameter selection. If you do that, some managers will pay consultants, but it will be for honest advice from valuation experts; they could also eschew that advice by negotiating less complex lease terms that they can understand and value straightforwardly.  Honest advice is geared toward discovering the underlying economics of an arrangement, and it will cost a small fraction of the FAS 13-style advice. In the process of all this, your policy choices will create value for shareholders.  

But, don't just take my word for this. Credit Suisse analysts recently issued a report entitled, What if All Financial Instruments Were at Fair Value?" [I can't find it on the web, so I don't dare post a link to my own electronic copy]. In it, I discovered a refreshing message that I hope ITAC, CFA and FASB will take to heart:

"With companies paying more attention to the fair values of their financial instruments, behavior could change. The controls that would need to be put in place and the due diligence involved could force companies to better understand their assets and liabilities. If that were to result in better management, companies could be rewarded with a lower cost of capital." [emphasis supplied]

 

Shalom, and L'shana Tovah (Happy New Year!)

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*The IASB also has a DP out on the topic that is about 90% similar to the FASB's. So for simplicity, I just refer to the FASB's version from here on out.

**I am an ardent supporter of replacement cost measurements, especially for leases. For example, I haven't the slightest idea how the FASB is going to come up with an exit price concept for non-transferable leases. But, to avoid distractions from other points, I am going to presume solely for the sake of sidestepping this issue that all leases are transferable. It doesn't cause replacement cost and fair value to converge, but it gets us close enough for my purposes in this post.

Comments

[Joel Ungar]

Tom - great insights as always. I've been trying to follow this issue as well. My clients are not Fortune 500, so naturally I fear the result is going to be too complicated for them. I'm hoping though that we get a good standard, not just one that is better than SFAS 13 (which won't be difficult).

L'Shana Tova to you and your family.

[Raza]

Hi Tom - an excellent and direct post. It made perfect sense. If complication could guide us to the truth, we would have reached it by now :)We need someone like you at FASB (and yes in place of RH).Keep up the Great postings. Kind Regards, Raza

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