Current NASDAQ Corporation Methods of Reporting Comprehensive Income

Statement of Financial Accounting Standard No. 130 (SFAS 130) was released in 1997 which required publicly traded companies to separately report comprehensive income in the financial statements. SFAS 130 prescribed three alternative formats for the presentation without mandating any one specific format. SFAS 130 also required certain details of comprehensive income to be displayed prominently in the financial statements. The current study examined the presentation of comprehensive income by a sample of companies traded on the NASDAQ market to determine the predominant method of presentation among these companies, five years after SFAS 130 became effective. Results of the examination of one hundred annual reports showed that a majority of the sampled companies used the third approach, which was to present comprehensive income as part of the Statement of Stockholders’ Equity, as against the first two approaches that favored presentation of comprehensive income on the face of the Income Statement or in a separate statement. Further, the paper also discusses some ancillary findings pertaining to the presentation of the details of comprehensive income.