From the Chair of the Business Valuation Committee: Draft Reports, Oral Reports, Record Keeping, and USPAP

Abstract

This letter ‘‘From the Chair’’ is admittedly rather lengthy, but it provides very important information and updates about the 2016–2017 edition of The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) and about draft reports, oral reports, and record keeping. I understand that there was a debate at the annual AICPA forensic and valuation conference regarding whether forensic and valuation professionals providing litigation services could or should comply with USPAP’s record-keeping rule related to the retention of reports in the work file. No one from the Appraisal Standards Board (ASB) or anyone formerly associated with the ASB participated at that debate. I personally have seen this debate flare up on the various valuation and appraisal professional blogs on the internet. I also have a personal interest, not only as the chair of the Business Valuation Committee (BVC), but as an ASA that provides litigation services. I decided to do some research to educate myself further. USPAP is a product of the ASB of the Appraisal Foundation (TAF). The TAF was formed in the late 1980s by a consortium of appraisal and valuation professional organizations (including the ASA) in response to complaints about faulty appraisals during the ‘‘Savings and Loan’’ crisis. Therefore, the ASB created USPAP in order to ‘‘promote and maintain a high level of public trust in appraisal practice by establishing requirements for appraisers.’’ The ASA was a founding sponsor and continues to be a sponsor of TAF. As a sponsor, the ASA agrees to hold its accredited members to USPAP. ASA is the only business valuation organization that requires its accredited members to comply with USPAP. Currently, USPAP is published every two years. The next issuance will be for 2016 and 2017. In advance of each new issue of USPAP, the ASB considers any updates it wishes to make to the document. Any such recommended updates are based upon requests from various stakeholders (i.e., not from TAF or ASB) and are disclosed to the public in exposure drafts and public meetings wherein the ASB solicits comments. On January 7, 2014, the ASB issued its First Exposure Draft of proposed changes for the 2016–2017 edition of USPAP (‘‘first draft’’). In the first draft, the ASB proposed, among other things, that it had ‘‘heard,’’ primarily from ‘‘enforcement officials,’’ concerns about the definition of report in USPAP and about the requirements in USPAP about the treatment of draft reports. ‘‘Report’’ is defined in the 2014–2015 edition of USPAP as ‘‘any communication, written or oral, of an appraisal or appraisal review that is transmitted to the client upon completion of an assignment’’ (emphasis added). The concerns were related to appraisers who may have developed multiple reports in an assignment and then could attempt to disavow responsibility for earlier iterations (some of which included signed appraiser certifications) because they were not transmitted to the client upon completion of an assignment. In the first draft, the ASB sought to redefine the term ‘‘report’’ in USPAP by eliminating the link to the completion of an assignment. Rather, the ASB proposed linking the definition of report to a signed certification and transmittal to the client or any other intended user. In comments provided to the ASB on the first draft, ASA International President (at the time) Mark Penny stated, ‘‘[the ASA agrees] that the definition of a report should be linked to when the certification is signed by the appraiser and the report is issued to the client’’ (original emphasis) and that the ASA does not believe that ‘‘‘the completion of an assignment’ should enter into the definition of a report.’’ Also in the first draft, the ASB sought to address perceived ‘‘confusion and disagreement’’ on recordkeeping requirements related to preliminary, draft, and revised reports. Under the record-keeping rule of the 2014–2015 edition, USPAP requires that ‘‘[a] written summary of an oral report must be added to the workfile [sic] within a reasonable period of time after the issuance of an oral report’’ and that the work file must include