Question

As a senior auditor at A.A. & Cornwell LLP., you are working on the audit of Stars & Stripes Inc. Stars & Stripes is a publicly traded company and has current earnings per share of $1.04 reported on its income statement. An associate auditor on your team is reviewing the Stars & Stripes statement of cash flows for the year under audit. Specifically, she is calculating various cash flow ratios. She asks you if there should be a per share disclosure presented on the face of the statement of cash flows. Which section of the authoritative guidance best describes whether a per share amount is required to be presented on the statement of cash flows or not? Enter your response in the answer fields below. Guidance on correctly structuring your response appears above and below the answer fields.

Type the topic here. Correctly formatted FASB ASC topics are 3 digits.

FASB ASC （ ）- （ ）- （ ）-（ ）

Answer 1

FASB ASC 230-10-45-3 prohibits an entity from reporting cash flow per share on the face of financial statements.

This is basically because  reporting cash flow per share would falsely imply that cash flow, or some component of it, is a possible alternative to earnings per share as a measure of performance.

A major problem in reporting cash flow per share data is investor understanding. Investors over many years have become accustomed to seeing operating data per share computed only for earnings. Moreover, the measurement problems associated with reporting earnings on a per share basis have been considered and largely settled. To report other data on a per share basis invites the danger that investors, creditors, and others may confuse those measures with the conventional accounting measure of earnings per share