Effects of IFRS adoption on the financial statements of Nigerian listed entities: the case of oil and gas companies

On 28 July 2010, the Nigerian Federal Executive Council approved January 1, 2012 as the effective date for the convergence of Nigerian Statement of Accounting Standards (SAS) or Nigerian GAAP (NG-GAAP) with International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS). By this pronouncement, all publicly listed companies and significant public interest entities in Nigeria were statutorily required to issue IFRS based financial statements for the year ended December, 2012. This study investigates the impact of the adoption of IFRS on the financial statements of Nigerian listed Oil and Gas entities using six years of data which covers three years before and three years after IFRS adoption in Nigeria and other African countries. First, the study evaluates the impact of IFRS adoption on the Exploration and Evaluation (E&E) expenditures of listed Oil and Gas companies. Second, it examines the impact of IFRS adoption on the provision for decommissioning of Oil and Gas installations and environmental rehabilitation expenditures. Third, the study analyses the impact of the adoption of IFRS on the average daily Crude Oil production cost per Barrel. Fourth, it examines the extent to which the adoption and implementation of IFRS affects the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) of listed Oil and Gas companies. The study further explores the impact of IFRS adoption on the contractual relationships between Nigerian Government and Oil and Gas companies in terms of Joint Ventures (JVs) and Production Sharing Contracts (PSCs) as it relates to taxes, royalties, bonuses and Profit Oil Split. A Paired Samples t-test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and Gray’s (Gray, 1980) Index of Conservatism analyses were conducted simultaneously where the accounting numbers, financial ratios and industry specific performance measures of GAAP and IFRS were computed and analysed and the significance of the differences of the mean, median and Conservatism Index values were compared before and after IFRS adoption. Questionnaires were then administered to the key stakeholders in the adoption and implementation of IFRS and the responses collated and analysed. The results of the analyses reveal that most of the accounting numbers, financial ratios and industry specific performance measures examined changed significantly as a result of the transition from GAAP to IFRS. The E&E expenditures and the mean cost of Crude Oil production per barrel of Oil and Gas companies increased significantly. The GAAP values of inventories, GPM, ROA, Equity and TA were also significantly different from the IFRS values. However, the differences in the provision for decommissioning expenditures were not statistically significant. Gray’s (Gray, 1980) Conservatism Index shows that Oil and Gas companies were more conservative under GAAP when compared to the IFRS regime. The Questionnaire analyses reveal that IFRS based financial statements are of higher quality, easier to prepare and present to management and easier to compare among competitors across the Oil and Gas sector but slightly more difficult to audit compared to GAAP based financial statements. To my knowledge, this is the first empirical research to investigate the impact of IFRS adoption on the financial statements of listed Oil and Gas companies. The study will therefore make an enormous contribution to academic literature and body of knowledge and void the existing knowledge gap regarding the impact and implications of IFRS adoption on the financial statements of Oil and Gas companies.

Efficient and precise interactive hand tracking through joint, continuous optimization of pose and correspondences

Fully articulated hand tracking promises to enable fundamentally new interactions with virtual and augmented worlds, but the limited accuracy and efficiency of current systems has prevented widespread adoption. Today's dominant paradigm uses machine learning for initialization and recovery followed by iterative model-fitting optimization to achieve a detailed pose fit. We follow this paradigm, but make several changes to the model-fitting, namely using: (1) a more discriminative objective function; (2) a smooth-surface model that provides gradients for non-linear optimization; and (3) joint optimization over both the model pose and the correspondences between observed data points and the model surface. While each of these changes may actually increase the cost per fitting iteration, we find a compensating decrease in the number of iterations. Further, the wide basin of convergence means that fewer starting points are needed for successful model fitting. Our system runs in real-time on CPU only, which frees up the commonly over-burdened GPU for experience designers. The hand tracker is efficient enough to run on low-power devices such as tablets. We can track up to several meters from the camera to provide a large working volume for interaction, even using the noisy data from current-generation depth cameras. Quantitative assessments on standard datasets show that the new approach exceeds the state of the art in accuracy. Qualitative results take the form of live recordings of a range of interactive experiences enabled by this new approach.

‘‘Model age-based” and ‘‘copy when uncertain” biases in children’s social learning of a novel task

Theoretical models of social learning predict that individuals can benefit from using strategies that specify when and whom to copy. Here the interaction of two social learning strategies, model age-based biased copying and copy when uncertain, was investigated. Uncertainty was created via a systematic manipulation of demonstration efficacy (completeness) and efficiency (causal relevance of some actions). The participants, 4- to 6-year-old children (N = 140), viewed both an adult model and a child model, each of whom used a different tool on a novel task. They did so in a complete condition, a near-complete condition, a partial demonstration condition, or a no-demonstration condition. Half of the demonstrations in each condition incorporated causally irrelevant actions by the models. Social transmission was assessed by first responses but also through children’s continued fidelity, the hallmark of social traditions. Results revealed a bias to copy the child model both on first response and in continued interactions. Demonstration efficacy and efficiency did not affect choice of model at first response but did influence solution exploration across trials, with demonstrations containing causally irrelevant actions decreasing exploration of alternative methods. These results imply that uncertain environments can result in canalized social learning from specific classes of mode