On June 23, 2020, the Division of Corporation Finance (CF) and the Office of the Chief Accountant of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) released guidance that provides additional views on disclosure related to COVID-19, supplementing earlier guidance provided on March 25, 2020 and April 3, 2020, respectively.

IN DEPTH

The latest guidance reiterates earlier statements encouraging companies to provide disclosures that allow investors to evaluate the current and expected impact of COVID-19 through the eyes of management and to proactively revise and update disclosures as facts and circumstances change.

In the new guidance, CF provided the following to help companies analyze their specific facts and circumstances:

• What are the material operational challenges that management and the Board of Directors are monitoring and evaluating? How and to what extent have you altered your operations, such as implementing health and safety policies for employees, contractors and customers, to deal with these challenges, including challenges related to employees returning to the workplace? How are the changes impacting or reasonably likely to impact your financial condition and short- and long-term liquidity?

• How is your overall liquidity position and outlook evolving? To the extent COVID-19 is adversely impacting your revenues, consider whether such impacts are material to your sources and uses of funds, as well as the materiality of any assumptions you make about the magnitude and duration of COVID-19’s impact on your revenues. Are any decreases in cash flow from operations having a material impact on your liquidity position and outlook?

• Have you accessed revolving lines of credit or raised capital in the public or private markets to address your liquidity needs? Are your disclosures regarding these actions and any unused liquidity sources providing investors with a complete discussion of your financial condition and liquidity?

• Have COVID-19-related impacts affected your ability to access your traditional funding sources on the same or reasonably similar terms as were available to you in recent periods? Have you provided additional collateral, guarantees or equity to obtain funding? Have there been material changes in your cost of capital? How has a change, or a potential change, to your credit rating impacted your ability to access funding? Do your financing arrangements contain terms that limit your ability to obtain additional funding? If so, is the uncertainty of additional funding reasonably likely to result in your liquidity decreasing in a way that would result in you being unable to maintain current operations?

• Are you at material risk of not meeting covenants in your credit and other agreements?

• If you include metrics, such as cash burn rate or daily cash use, in your disclosures, are you providing a clear definition of the metric and explaining how management uses the metric in managing or monitoring liquidity? Are there estimates or assumptions underlying such metrics the disclosure of which is necessary for the metric not to be misleading?

• Have you reduced your capital expenditures and if so, how? Have you reduced or suspended share repurchase programs or dividend payments? Have you ceased any material business operations or disposed of a material asset or line of business? Have you materially reduced or increased your human capital resource expenditures? Are any of these measures temporary in nature, and if so, how long do you expect to maintain them? What factors will you consider in deciding to extend or curtail these measures? What is the short- and long-term impact of these reductions on your ability to generate revenues and meet existing and future financial obligations?

• Are you able to timely service your debt and other obligations? Have you taken advantage of available payment deferrals, forbearance periods, or other concessions? What are those concessions and how long will they last? Do you foresee any liquidity challenges once those accommodations end?

• Have you altered terms with your customers, such as extended payment terms or refund periods, and if so, how have those actions materially affected your financial condition or liquidity? Did you provide concessions or modify terms of arrangements as a landlord or lender that will have a material impact? Have you modified other contractual arrangements in response to COVID-19 in such a way that the revised terms may materially impact your financial condition, liquidity and capital resources?

• Are you relying on supplier finance programs, otherwise referred to as supply chain financing, structured trade payables, reverse factoring or vendor financing, to manage your cash flow? Have these arrangements had a material impact on your balance sheet, statement of cash flows or short- and long-term liquidity and if so, how? What are the material terms of the arrangements? Did you or any of your subsidiaries provide guarantees related to these programs? Do you face a material risk if a party to the arrangement terminates it? What amounts payable at the end of the period relate to these arrangements, and what portion of these amounts has an intermediary already settled for you?

• Have you assessed the impact material events that occurred after the end of the reporting period, but before the financial statements were issued, have had or are reasonably likely to have on your liquidity and capital resources and considered whether disclosure of subsequent events in the financial statements and known trends or uncertainties in MD&A is required?

CF also indicated that companies receiving federal assistance (e.g., loans pursuant to the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act) should consider the short- and long-term impact of that assistance on their financial condition, results of operations, liquidity and capital resources, as well as the related disclosures and critical accounting estimates and assumptions, focusing on the following questions:

• How does a loan impact your financial condition, liquidity and capital resources? What are the material terms and conditions of any assistance you received, and do you anticipate being able to comply with them? Do those terms and conditions limit your ability to seek other sources of financing or affect your cost of capital? Do you reasonably expect restrictions, such as maintaining certain employment levels, to have a material impact on your revenues or income from continuing operations or to cause a material change in the relationship between costs and revenues? Once any such restrictions lapse, do you expect to change your operations in a material way?

• Are you taking advantage of any recent tax relief, and if so, how does that relief impact your short- and long-term liquidity? Do you expect a material tax refund for prior periods?

• Does the assistance involve new material accounting estimates or judgments that should be disclosed or materially change a prior critical accounting estimate? What accounting estimates were made, such as the probability a loan will be forgiven, and what uncertainties are involved in applying the related accounting guidance?

Management should consider whether conditions and events, taken as a whole, raise substantial doubt about the company’s ability to meet its obligations as they become due within one year after the issuance of the financial statements, including the questions below:

• Are there conditions and events that give rise to the substantial doubt about the company’s ability to continue as a going concern? For example, have you defaulted on outstanding obligations? Have you faced labor challenges or a work stoppage?

• What are your plans to address these challenges? Have you implemented any portion of those plans?

Additionally, on June 23, 2020, the chief accountant of the SEC issued a statement regarding the importance of high-quality financial reporting in light of the significant impacts of COVID-19, supplementing an earlier statement provided on April 3, 2020.

Of note, the chief accountant remarked that changes to business and additional uncertainties may result in further risks of material misstatement to financial statements for which new or enhanced controls may need to be implemented. If any such changes materially affect, or are reasonably likely to materially affect, a company’s internal controls over financial reporting, such changes must be disclosed in quarterly filings in the fiscal quarter in which they occurred.

Furthermore, the chief accountant provided a reminder that US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) presumes a reporting entity has the ability to continue as a going concern and that in each reporting period, including interim periods, management should consider whether relevant conditions and events, taken as a whole, raise substantial doubt about a company’s ability to meet its obligations as they become due within one year after the issuance of such financial statements.

The chief accountant also addressed the role of audit committees, noting that in these times of rapid change and increased uncertainty, the need for the oversight role that audit committees play is as critical as ever and that the most effective audit committees are engaged, executing their responsibilities with diligence, and this engagement significantly enhances the financial reporting output.

The above-mentioned guidance and statement are available here and here.