Problem:
Although the basic financial statements for a company may take only four or five pages, some annual reports are now over 200 pages long. You are a staff member at FASB, and you have been asked to respond to a letter that contains the following statement:
"You guys need to cut out a lot of the required disclosures. Most footnotes are written in language that only accountants can understand, so companies are spending time and money preparing information that investors don't use."
Respond with at least two examples of how and why FASB requires the information found in footnotes.