[This is my fourth consecutive post on loan accounting. Here are the first, second and third.]
I love finding accounting lessons buried in stories that on their surface seem to have little to do with accounting. See, for example, my post on the appalling politics of joint replacement databases, "No Escaping the Politics of Information." The example I'm going to describe here is a little bit closer to home than body parts: an August 11th, WSJ article headlined, "For Chesapeake, a Question on How it Counts Reserves."
Some background: in January 2004, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it would have to reduce its "proved" oil and gas reserves by 3.9 billion barrels, which was about 20% of their reserves. Another 2 billion barrels were written off in the ensuing months.
The gist of the WSJ article is that ever since the Royal Dutch Shell writedowns and the ensuing securities fraud claims, reserve quantity reporting practices evolved to obtaining some level of outside assurance from independent experts. Consequently, Chesapeake's share price may be discounted by investors because, "[Only] seventy-seven percent of the reserve estimates … reported for 2011 were produced by independent engineering firms, while the rest came from a growing team of in-house reservoir engineers. A survey of nine of Chesapeake's competitors in the same year showed third-party involvement in 89% of reserve estimates, on average."
Chesapeake challenges the claim that its share price is depressed by the possibility of unreliable reserve estimates. While "third-party involvement" could take the form of audits of in-house estimates, or independent estimates, a Chesapeake spokesman claims that its use of third party estimates is more heavily weighted toward independent estimates, while its peers go the other way.
An Analogy to Accounting for Loans
But, whatever the particulars of the facts and circumstances surrounding Chesapeake, there are interesting comparisons to be made about loan loss reserves and oil and gas reserves.
The first thing to consider is that accurate estimates of future loan defaults are extremely critical to any evaluation of the financial health of banks, just as "proved" oil and gas reserve quantities are to energy companies.
Second, I would argue that estimates of oil and gas reserves are inherently more reliable than estimates of loan loss reserves. Even though oil and gas reserves could be thousands of feet underground, they are tangible, and they can be sampled and probed. Please don't ask me to cite any of it, but there must be scads of theoretical and empirical scientific studies to support the validity of the methods employed.
In contrast, estimates of loan loss reserves are ineffable; and methodologies for predicting future losses are, to say the least, controversial. It's a paradox that oil and gas managers engage outside experts to estimate reserves for financial reporting purposes; yet bank managers, who have the more subjective task, think they know enough to estimate loan loss reserves all by themselves.
Third, the SEC requires a financial statement audit of every public company, including banks and energy companies; however, it doesn't require an audit of oil and gas reserves [see Regulation S-K Item 1202(a)(7) and (8)]. Largely in response to the Royal Dutch Shell debacle, managers of oil and gas companies have voluntarily engaged independent experts, whose reputations must perforce depend on their track records, to provide a higher level of assurance to investors than required by law. Obviously, the same can't be said for banks' measures of loan loss reserves.
Fourth, estimates of loan loss reserves are much more critical to the global economy than estimates of energy reserves. Given the market forces that moved oil and gas company managers to act, it seems that another debacle like Royal Dutch Shell is unlikely; but if it did occur, it probably wouldn't shake up the markets as much as a major restatement from a too-big-fail bank.
And what's the likelihood of a bank having to correct its loan loss reserves? There are whole countries in Europe whose banking systems could be on the brink of collapse!
Are financial statement audits of banks helping to allay your fears? Not mine!
Consider as well that audits of loan loss reserves are at the top of the list of deficiencies uncovered by the PCAOB. Even setting aside the question of whether auditors are capable of evaluating bank managers' clairvoyance, all too frequently, it seems, auditors have not even adhered to their own protocols.
The Moral of the Story
If you buy into the analogy, and I believe it is quite compelling, then, just as energy companies employ independent scientists, banks should be required to obtain estimates of loan loss reserves or market values (I would much, much prefer the latter) from outside financial experts. Maybe then, market prices of bank stocks and book values would converge. As it is now, investors don't believe the banks' "audited" numbers. Investors surely understand that auditors can and should verify facts, but they are not qualified to predict the future, or even to merely offer an opinion that management's prediction of the future appears reasonable.
In the case of oil and gas companies, the vicissitudes of capital markets led to higher quality financial reporting. But alas, vested interests in entrenched and outdated regulations are preventing it from happening at banks. I am a strong proponent of securities regulation, but sometimes it can get in the way of needed improvements to the information available to investors.
This is one of those times.
Recent Comments