ACCT 635 Week 4 Individual Research Project Outline and Annotated Bibliography Example

New U.S. Accounting Standards in Target Corporation's 2025 Form 10-K: Research Project Outline and Annotated Bibliography

Company and Research Question

The company is Target Corporation, a U.S. general merchandise retailer listed on the New York Stock Exchange that reports under U.S. GAAP, and the filing is the annual report it filed in 2026 for fiscal 2025, which ended on the final day of January 2026. The research question is this: how have four recent FASB updates, on supplier finance programs, segment reporting, income tax disclosures and expense disaggregation, changed what Target's 10-K tells investors, and does the change bring the filing closer to the conceptual framework's goal of decision-useful information?

Outline

I. Introduction: Target's size and the reason a retailer is a useful test case. II. Theory: the objective of financial reporting, relevance and faithful representation, and economic consequences. III. Supplier finance programs: what ASU 2022-04 requires and what Target's roll-forward shows. IV. Segment reporting for a single-segment company: what ASU 2023-07 changed and what Target now discloses. V. Income taxes: the new rate reconciliation and taxes-paid disclosures under ASU 2023-09, using Target's fiscal 2025 figures. VI. Expense disaggregation: what ASU 2024-03 will require of Target and what research suggests investors will gain. VII. Evaluation: whether the changes improve decision usefulness, at what cost. VIII. Conclusion, including a biblical perspective on transparency.

Annotated Bibliography

Ai, L., Gu, X., & Yu, K. (2025). The effects of ASC 842 on the value and risk relevance of operating lease liabilities. European Accounting Review, 35(1), 291-317. https://doi.org/10.1080/09638180.2025.2513951

Ai et al. (2025) find that recognizing operating lease liabilities under ASC 842 increased their value relevance and risk relevance compared with the earlier footnote disclosure, because recognition made the amounts more reliable and easier to process. The study is recent, large-sample and published in a leading international journal. It will support Section II's argument that recognition and disclosure are not equivalent, a point the paper applies to Target's supplier finance and tax disclosures.

Blann, J. J., & Moon, J. R. (2026). Income statement expense disaggregation. The Accounting Review, 101(3), 137-165. https://doi.org/10.2308/tar-2023-0545

Blann and Moon (2026) study expense disaggregation that companies provided voluntarily before ASU 2024-03 and find it common and growing, with evidence that cost of goods sold detail is decision-useful for investors and analysts while selling and administrative detail is not. As the most direct large-sample evidence on the coming standard, it is central to Section VI, where the paper predicts which of Target's new disclosures will matter most.

Financial Accounting Standards Board. (2022). Accounting standards update No. 2022-04: Liabilities, supplier finance programs (Subtopic 405-50): Disclosure of supplier finance program obligations.

The FASB (2022) update requires buyers that use supplier finance programs to disclose the programs' key terms, the amount outstanding, where it is presented on the balance sheet and a roll-forward of the obligation, the roll-forward taking effect a year after the rest. It is the authoritative source for Section III and frames the analysis of Target's figures.

Financial Accounting Standards Board. (2023a). Accounting standards update No. 2023-07: Segment reporting (Topic 280): Improvements to reportable segment disclosures.

The FASB (2023a) update makes companies show the major segment costs their top decision maker sees routinely, a figure for everything else and who that decision maker is, and it pulls one-segment companies fully into the rules. A company with one segment still has to explain how management reads its own numbers. It is the authoritative basis for Section IV, since Target reports one segment.

Financial Accounting Standards Board. (2023b). Accounting standards update No. 2023-09: Income taxes (Topic 740): Improvements to income tax disclosures.

The FASB (2023b) update requires public companies to present the rate reconciliation in both amounts and percentages using specified categories, to disclose reconciling items above a threshold separately and to disaggregate income taxes paid by federal, state and foreign jurisdictions. It took effect for annual periods beginning after December 15, 2024, making Target's fiscal 2025 10-K its first year of application, and it anchors Section V.

Financial Accounting Standards Board. (2024). Accounting standards update No. 2024-03: Income statement, reporting comprehensive income, expense disaggregation disclosures (Subtopic 220-40): Disaggregation of income statement expenses.

The FASB (2024) update will make public companies itemize what sits inside each major expense line, inventory bought, wages and benefits, depreciation and intangible amortization, for years starting after mid-December 2026. It defines what Target must add in a later filing and supports Section VI.

Hanlon, M. (2003). What can we infer about a firm's taxable income from its financial statements? National Tax Journal, 56(4), 831-863. https://doi.org/10.17310/ntj.2003.4.07

Hanlon (2003) explains why the tax figures in financial statements are a poor guide to a company's actual taxable income and taxes paid, citing differences in consolidation, the treatment of stock options and the limits of tax footnote disclosure. Although it predates the new standard by two decades, it states clearly the problem ASU 2023-09 addresses and will support Section V's argument about why investors asked for better tax disclosure.

Target Corporation. (2026). Form 10-K: 2025 annual report. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Target Corporation (2026) is the primary source for the project. Its financial statements and notes report net sales of $104.8 billion, an effective tax rate of 22.3 percent, a supplier finance obligation of $3.0 billion and one reportable segment, along with notes describing recently adopted and recently issued standards. Every empirical section of the paper draws on it.

Wolk, H. I., Dodd, J. L., & Rozycki, J. J. (2017). Accounting theory: Conceptual issues in a political and economic environment (9th ed.). SAGE.

Wolk et al. (2017), the course textbook, develop the conceptual framework, the economic consequences of standards and the political setting of standard setting. It will supply the theory in Section II and the evaluative lens in Section VII.

Closing Note

The sources cover every section of the outline, with the 10-K and the four updates supplying the evidence and the three studies supplying the evaluation. One gap remains: research on segment disclosures for single-segment companies is thin, so Section IV may rely mainly on the update and the filing. I will look for a recent study before drafting.