Accounting Analysis of the 2011 Annual Report for Bank of Queensland Limited Essay

1. Executive Summary The aim of this report is to provide an accounting analysis of the 2011 annual report for Bank of Queensland Limited (BOQ), and a critique of the reporting of their performance. The report discusses the choice of accounting policies and the flexibility of these policies. The main objective of this report is to evaluate and recognise the possibility of using creative accounting within the company, recognise and questionable accounting numbers within items listed previously. A number of items have been selected from Income Statement, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow Statement. 2. Overview Bank of Queensland Limited (BOQ), has history of 137 years with network of over 280 branches operating in Queensland. It offers core banking (commercial/retail), equipment finance, wealth management and insuranceservices. BOQ is listed on the ASX and uses its unique concept of the Owner-Managed Branch (OMB),a partnership between the Bank of Queensland (franchisor) and experienced bank managers (franchisees) to provide banking services. See more:  Capital budgeting essay 3. Description of key accounting policies and standards 3.1 Loans and advances at amortised cost (Asset) As shown on BOQ’s Balance sheet in FY11, loans and advances at amortised cost are big-ticket itemsin its assets accounting for approximately 98 per cent. According to the significant accounting policies explored by BOQ annual report 2011, loans and advances are originated by the bank and are recognised upon cash being advanced to the borrower. Based on AASB13, loans and advances are initially recognised at fair value plus incremental direct transaction cost using the effective interest method. 3.2 Deposits and borrowing (Liability) Deposits, as the one of the most important cash inflows of the bank, follow ruleAASB13 as well. They are initially recognised at fair value plus transaction costs and thenby using the effective interest method, they are measured at amortised cost. It is classified in two concentrations: retail deposits and wholesale deposits. 3.3 Employee benefits (Expense) This item follows AASB119Employee Benefits which has been amended in its accounting rules affecting the measurement of its obligations and the timing of recognition of termination benefits. Employee benefits can be classified to four categories: wages, salaries and annual leave; long service leave; superannuation plan and share based payments. 4. Flexibility of Management in Selecting the Key Accounting Policies It is undeniable that having flexiblemanagement can exert positive effects on the presentation of company’s annual financial report. Specifically, from the Bank of Queensland ´s perspective, if mangers have considerable adaptability in selecting the key accounting policies, the financial performance of Bank of Queensland Ltd can be improved; therefore more investors and customers would give priority to cooperating with them in the future. 4.1 Loan and Advances at Amortized Cost 4.1.1 Flexibility Analysis The measurement of loans and advances at amortized cost is extremelyfavourable to commercial banks. From BOQ’s consolidated financial annual report, the loan and advances at amortized cost accounted for around 83.3% of total assets in 2011, it had increased from 31,736,5 million to 33,276,1 million during 2010 to 2011. This change in $1539, 6 million was caused by impairment charges made by managers of the bank. The increase of loans and advances at amortized cost could enhance the customers trust in the bank. Sincefinancial funds, credit business and debts are the core business transaction of the banking industry, this itemappears to increase receivable accounts. Also, as banks could charge a reasonable rate of interest on such future loans/advances, they are able utilizethis income to pay current liabilities, wage and salaries of employees, and also the tax liability of business. Consequently, the BOQ’s managers have selected a flexible accounting policy in this item. 4.1.2 Accounting policies analysis Being dominant in the assets, loans and advances at amortized cost carries the burden of generating cash. The way that Bank of Queensland recognizes loans and advances at amortized cost can be separated to two phases. Initially, loans are recognized at fair value plus incremental direct transaction costs. Secondly, BOQ uses effective interest method to measure the amortized cost at each reporting date. The advantage of this accounting policy is that including direct transaction cost in the loan price can offset the actual transaction cost occurred and maximize the profit for the bank. Additionally, the effective interest method is considered as one of the prior methods for amortizing a bond discount. Theoretically, investors require a discount on bonds because the market interest rate at the time of issue is higher than the coupon payments on the bond. Therefore, by amortizing the discount at the market interest rate, accounting statement of Bank of Queensland will exactly reveal the economic reality of the bond issue and its true cost of debt. 4.2Deposits and Borrowing 4.2.1 Flexibility Analysis Due to the characteristics of banking industry, there is a high flexibility for management in these two liabilities. It is noticeable that deposits and borrowing accounted for about 97% of total liabilities on the balance sheet. Occupying 69% of total deposits, managers pay more attention to Retail Banking Services because of itsattractiveness to customers compared to other types of deposits. 4.2.2 Accounting Policies Analysis This policy states that securitization set-up costs relating to on-balance sheet assets are included with securitization borrowings, and amortization is recorded as interest expense. Initially, excluding off-balance sheet costs makes the liability much smaller and enlarges their net assets. Likewise, interest on debt is a tax-deductible expense and creates a tax shield benefiting Bank of Queensland. The major function for this policy is to save cash flows for BOQ. 4.3 Employee Benefits 4.3.1 Flexibility Analysis Employee expenses mainly consist of share based payments and employee benefits. All of these kinds of financial activities are beneficialto BOQ.The result from increasing incentives to employees applies as it encourages them to performenthusiasticallywhicheventuallyleads to higher profits for the firm. 4.3.2 Accounting policy analysis Among Employee Benefits, shared based payments are distinguished. The accounting policy demonstrates that Bank of Queensland allows employees to acquire its shares, options and rights sold recognized in the Employee Benefits Reserve. This expense could be reversed if the loss is not due to a market condition. This is highly beneficial as it encourages employees to purchase shares of their own company but, on the other hand, as more shares are sold, the higher price rises in the stock exchange. 5. Quality of Disclosure Made in BOQ Accounts The quality of disclosure in the BOQ ´s policies, strategy, performance and financial statements and reports is satisfactory as it provides accessible, transparent and fairly justified information. As the BOQ is a listed company, it has to comply with all ASX disclosure policies and reporting but in addition it also complies with the ASX Corporate Governance Recommendations as well as the Australian Prudential Standards (APS) (Profit Announcement 2011). In the profit announcement report for 2011, BOQ discloses a number of disclosure principles which include management, board structure, ethical and responsible decision making, financial reporting, timely and balanced disclosure, respect rights of shareholders, recognize and manage risk, remuneration. 5.1 Business Strategy and Economic Consequences The business strategy and economic consequences are disclosed in the notes to the annual report in terms of the risk management of the company. As it explains in these notes the bank approach is to manage its risk in terms of credit risk, market risk, liquidity, operational risk, compliance policies and capital management. As it states in the annual report there is a high level of assessment and monitoring of these risks in order to follow the company ´s strategy. 5.2 Notes to the Financial Statements – Explanation of Policies The notes to the financial statements and reports do provide an explanation to the bank ´s management policies. According to the 2011 Annual Report these policies provide effectiveness and efficiency in terms of managing the risks described above as well as creating controls to support growth and competitive advantage. An example of these policies in 2011 was a strong expense management which lead them to reduce their cost-to-income ratio from 45.8% to 44.5%. Moreover, these policies provide regulatory compliance as well as performance management. 5.3 Explanation of Current Performance BOQ through its yearly Profit Announcement Report clearly explains its current performance in terms of its principal activities. It states its current level of profitability and the main reasons for any losses. As well as these profit or losses explanations the report shows explanations for changes in expenses, asset growth, retail deposit growth, branch network expansion and capital management. 5.4 Accounting / Financial Rules In terms of financial conventions that restrict the firm as a banking institution, the main one is the Basel II Accord in which the bank is obligated to maintain capital adequacy requirements. In the 2011 Annual report is mentioned that Tier 1 capital made up of equity capital and disclosed reserves was higher than required by Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA). Moreover, AASB 124 Related Party Disclosures is additionally disclosed in order to understand the impact on the firm. Moreover it discloses all its consolidated statements for all subsidiaries of the group following all consolidation standards. 5.5 Segment Disclosure The quality of the segment disclosure for BOQ is sufficient as it discloses its two operating segments, and since the bank operates only in Queensland, it does not need geographical segmentation. It discloses the high level metrics for both of the banking and insurance segments as well as consolidated totals (Annual Report 2011 pg. 89). Also, following consolidation requirements it eliminates inter-company transactions (Annual Report 2011 pg. 89). 6. Questionable Accounting Numbers The most important and questionable numbers can be seen in the yearly Profit Announcement where BOQ announced a net loss after tax of 90.6 million AUD. The explanation for this loss was attributed to significant impairment charges. As the income analysis shows that the company made a reasonable operating income loss, but the large part of the loss was due to a revision of their commercial loans and provisioning approach. They decided to increase these specific commercial loan provisions more than close to 90 million due to the continuous decline in commercial property in Queensland. Along with loan impairments, the bank also impaired a substantial amount of assets, also because of the decline if commercial property. Furthermore in the Directors Report in 2011 there were some potential red flags regarding remuneration. As the bank went through a restructure last year there were a number of high level managerial positions that changed in this period. During this transition there were a number of payments classified as  ´others` that did not have a clear explanation. An example of this includes a payment of half a million dollars to the previous CEO to  ´ensure a smooth transition` between him and the newly appointed CEO. While taking into account the Director ´s report is audited by KPMG, this payment seemed excessive. 7. Undone Distortions Based on previous parts, the conclusion has arrived that BOQ suffered net loss of $90.6 million because of the tremendous growth in impairment loss. The footnote disclosures in the Profit Announcement provide the composition of the impairment loss. According to note 11, loan impairment expenses totalled $327.7 million. $165.7 million of this amount is specific provision impairment and the rest $162 million relates to collective provision. Moreover, impairment loss for assets also amounts to $578.7 million. Note 4suggests that BOQ ´s management increase its impairment loss based on their estimates of dropping commercial property market. However, this estimate comes from historical experience and professional judgment. In contrast, the estimate might be different from actual results. Therefore, distortions may arise resulting from overstated impairment loss. In order to undo the distortion, the impairment loss should have been adjusted to a lower level with fewer provisions. 8. Financial Press Discussions Even before the Profit Announcement of BOQ came out, many financial reporters foresaw the net loss of BOQ resulting from increasing impairment loss. The downturns in tourism and recent natural disasters impacted Queensland’s economy negatively, and the conditions in Queensland were expected to remain challenging in the future because of strong Australian dollar. As a result, for BOQ— a company that is highly exposed to Queensland housing market, the current poor performance of might not change in short term.Following by the poor performance, BOQ isnow struggling to keep regulators happy and keep its capital at acceptable level. On 26 March 2012, BOQ announced aequity rising of $450 million. However, by doing this, the existing shareholders of BOQ will be heavily diluted and it will cause its share price to drop significantly.

Marx and Weber’s Theories of Class Structure in Modern Society Essay

Karl Marx has given us the most influential overview of how industrialization has affected the modern social formations. According to his industrialization gave us two new classes, which had evolved from the old feudal society. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat (Bradley, 2006: 134-135). The bourgeoisie in England, the new economically dominant class. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, they tried to strengthen its social and political power. At the local level, they obtained the power in many villages, especially north of the country. They did this through by starting schools and leisure facilities to the people. At the national level, they tried to challenge the old power group, the aristocracy. With the political reforms they tried to take from them the benefits they had gained through having had the political power. Especially important was the fact that, corn law that kept the price of agricultural commodities artificially high, and thus protected landowners from the free market, was abolished. In political terms, was not dissolved landowner class, but the bourgeoisie was to share power with them (Bradley, 2006: 135). Proletariat or working class, is the second class in modern society formations, according to Marx. Deprived of the opportunity to produce their own livelihoods, they were forced to sell all they possess, their labor, in order to survive. According to Marx, the relationship between these classes both that they were dependent on each other and hostile to each other. Workers needed for the bourgeoisie to find them work, and the bourgeoisie needed workers for a profit. But the relationship was an inherent conflict because of the exploitative nature of these financial arrangements contained (Bradley, 2006: 135). Like many other community comments from the nineteenth century, Marx thought that the pay no workers were paid, did not represent the value of the goods they created through their work. Through parts of their working hours, a worker producing goods corresponding to a value of their existence will cost. The rest of their working time, the goods they produce, represent additional value. Parts of this value was taken by the bourgeoisie, in the form of profit. It can be argued that the bourgeoisie, to take a risk nvestments and take the initiative to create jobs, deserve the profits. It is an important argument used by many today. Marx, however, believes that there are workers whose work produces goods that are entitled to these profits. But the payroll system, where you get paid a day’s job, not based on the effort you put down, hides the fact that the workers are taken from the profits of their work. This was what Marx meant by the exploitative nature of these financial arrangements contained. It was also in the interests of the bourgeoisie and increase their profits, to either cut the salaries of workers or get them to increase their production, without getting a higher salary (Bradley, 2006: 135-136). Marx believed that when the working class began to understand how they were exploited, and saw how unfair the system was, they would try to change it. They shared experiences and awareness of exploitation will be the basis for a whole class, which will stand up and dissolution of this economic system, replacing it with a fairer system where workers controlled the profits (Bradley, 2006. 36). Marx recognized the existence of multiple classes of society, but they seemed unimportant compared to the great struggle for power that we have described over here. Max Weber, however, wrote about the social importance of what are now described as the new middle class. These are variations of the groups of officials, from office workers to teachers, and leaders. Weber noted that the large growth of bureaucracy, led to a high increase in this new middle class. As the working class, this class was also quite maktlos, in the fact that they owned what they produced, but had to sell his own labor. Yet they received higher social benefits than the working class, and was thus placed in a situation of competition and rivalry with them. Weber believed, along with many other sociologists, that the growth of this new middle class would block the working class would rise up against the bourgeoisie (Bradley, 2006: 136). Weber’s concept of classes avveik from Marx on other important areas. While he acknowledged that there were important divisions in society between the classes of property and the propertyless, Weber believed that there were large differ even within these groups. Not only was it than the gap between the working and middle class, as described here, but also within classes. These divisions were created by the market that rewarded groups differ in terms of what skills they had. Scholars workers were more appreciated than the unlearned, because of their experience and training. The middle class had different groupings varying levels of qualifications, education, and training to offer. Within classes of property, there were also divisions between groups with according to what kind of property they possessed. While Marx’s exploitation theory and class conflict, he was to highlight the potential for unity between the two major classes, was Weber’s emphasis on the shared roles in the market resulted in his views on different groups within classes, that they existed in a climate of rivalry with each other. The conflict was as great within the classes as between the different classes (Bradley, 2006: 136-137). This effect was reinforced, according to Weber, because the economic conditions within the classes was further complicated by two other overlapping sources of social divisions, namely Weber call status and party affiliation. Differences in status refers to the different amount of prestige or social position held by different groups. Weber argued that the different status within the working class, working against Marx’s theory of a combined class that would stand against the bourgeoisie. Finally, Weber believed that the parties and other political organizations would go across class and status divisions in its membership, as they sought to mobilize the power to get to meet the interests of its members. On this basis, Weber produced a model of community formation that was more complex than Marx’s polar model (Bradley, 2006: 137). If you look at history at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it is more like speaking in relation to Marx’s model, than Weber. The period between 1780 to 1840 was a time of constant upheaval, in which workers fought against the new industrial system and tribulations, and poverty that industrialization brought with it. There were food shortages, hundreds of strikes and demonstrations in the industrialized areas. These riots led to political reforms such as voting rights for all men. But most riots were ocal and small scale, reflecting the fact that industrialization was a rough prosesss, which took different forms and occurred at varying speeds around. Which meant that workers were in rebellion against a seat, was not a problem elsewhere (Bradley, 2006: 137-138). As an introduction to the Communist Manifesto Karl Marx wrote the text and civil proletarian. In this text Marx portrays class organization in modern society. Out of the feudal ruin, developed the modern bourgeois society itself. This happened without the class divisions that existed in the society was abolished. In this new modern bourgeois society, new classes were inserted in place of the old, it was added to the new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle between classes. The change that stands out in this era, as the bourgeois era, however, is that it has simplified class antagonisms. The whole society sharing more and more into two great hostile camps, two classes that are directly against each other: bourgeoisie and proletariat. Large industry has created the world market that had been prepared by the discovery of America. The world market has made trade, shipping and transport across an immense development. This has again appeared back on the industry distribution, and to the same extent that the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital and it needed all the classes that came from the Middle Ages in the background. Thus we see how the modern bourgeoisie is itself a product of a long development, a series of upheavals in the mode of production and communication conditions. The bourgeoisie has not drunk during this century they have had class domination, created a more comprehensive, colossal productive forces than all preceding generations together. Subjugation of natural forces, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, shipping traffic, railways electric tickers, cultivation of whole continents, rivers made navigable, whole populations stamped out of the earth – what earlier century knew that such production forces hidden in society’s womb . The most important prerequisite for citizenship class existence and domination is that wealth accumulate in private hands, that capital formation and increased; condition for capital is wage labor. Employment depends solely on the competition the workers hemselves. Progress in the industry, that the bourgeoisie will-less and without resistance the carrier, leading to a revolutionary union of workers of associations rather than their division by mutual competition. With great industrial development thus loses the bourgeoisie itself the basis on which it produces and appropriates products. It produces mainly his own executioner. Bourgeoisie doom and victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable (Englestad, 1992: 235-243). Max Weber’s theories of social classes, is seen as the main alternative to Marx. Weber takes, like Marx, based on the economic conditions. But unlike Marx, Weber adds not only focus on the relationship between employers and employees, but several types of economic relations. As the basic class relationship Weber looks at Community in living conditions and life chances. This allows, for example, under certain historical conditions, creditors and debtors constitute classes in line with workers and employers (Englestad, 1992: 221). Weber parts Marx’s view that capitalism is a distinctive and hoyviktig event in Western society. But he does not share Marx’s view that the bourgeoisie will lose in the class struggle and class struggle that will create conditions for a society without classes. He looks instead at the â€Å"citizen† as the embodiment of a particular type of action, the purpose of rational action – a type of action that would overcome the national figure of history. The centralized socialist â€Å"bureaucracy† will also be an objective rational character or social position. However, this role will mean less freedom for the individual, and socialist planned economy would threaten society with tilstivning. Max Weber defeated why socialism and the beginnings of a political revolution in Germany in the last years of his life, because he preferred a civil society (Osterberg, 1984: 103-104). Marx believes that capitalism has led to a system where those who have much, the citizen will receive more, while those who have little, the worker will receive less. He believed that this was a system that the worker would not find themselves in, and therefore rebel against the bourgeois. Weber, however, was not so concerned about how the system could be changed. He was ore concerned with finding out why capitalism has evolved as it has done in the West. Marx sees the citizen as a tyrant utilization above the worker. This new social class utilizes the community for their own growth. Citizen control means of production, and to use them, he needs to buy labor from workers. The citizen does not work and even sympathize not with worker. Borg’s only interaction with the worker is when he goes around and complain that the worker is not working hard enough. The worker who does all the work but where is the citizen who has all the benefits. Marx wanted the worker’s revolution to create a society where everyone is equal and care about everyone’s welfare. Capitalism has no thoughts of a common welfare and does not care about the individual, only the capital and production. Here, Weber disagreed. He believed that the growth of capitalism, was a result of what he calls the Protestant ethic. Marx believes that the capitalist boss is lazy and demanding, does not match this with Weber’s view. Because of the Protestant ethic, he could not sit and pretend to, because it would be a sin. This meant that they would stand to work out of reverence to God. This is what Weber believes is the reason for the growth of capitalism. As capitalism grew up and the economy improved, they would continually reinvest their income. They worked hard and instead of using up what they earned with the same, one would set it aside. The continuous work ethic was a result of the belief that God wanted that to work, and working hard was hoping more to get to heaven. Weber believed that the Christian citizen would work hard for the income he received. Working for God’s glory, and the more successful you are, the more one is priced of God.