Goodwill Case Study

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The FAS has made changes throughout the years in the way to account for goodwill. Goodwill is when a company attempts to merge with another company to obtain the valuable intangible assets. These assets are anything that can 't be seen or touched. Valuable intangibles can be anything like a company name because it is well known. Many times companies will decide to merge because it can be beneficial to them to merge with well-known entities. This can also be less costly and less time-consuming versus building a brand new business on its own. On many occasions, gooodwill is amortized on accounting records. Amortization is not the most favorable approach for companies who are trying to attract investors. This because when amortization is not present in the books, it means that there aren 't high physical cash profits for shareholders. …show more content…

Finally, in 2001, the rules changed under the FAS 141 and 142 to help with the way goodwill will be accounted for. Bussines could now choose to either do an amortization or chose to contribute to impairment testing. Regardless of how companies would choose to do their goodwill, the Irs would still have to take its own precautions on to deal with goodwill. Goodwill can often be tricky in the sense to figure out how much it is really worth. In the case of the AOL Time Warner, it is mostly known as the worst business move in history. This is because these companies started out as being very profitable and were looking to grow in the stock market. Once the market collapse due to the recession the company Time Warner lost lots of money by acquiring AOL. If Time Warner would have known the true value of AOL at the time then this transaction wouldn 't have

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