Abstract ACME is a teaching case designed to acquaint intermediate-level accounting students or introductory masters level students with issues involved in cross-border transactions. The vice president of operations of a fictitious auto parts manufacturing company is in charge of examining the merits of expansion overseas. She feels that understanding the effects of overseas expansion through the eyes of an accountant will allow her to see many of the business issues involved in the expansion so that she can convey them to the other senior personnel. To learn what she feels she needs to know to present her argument to other officers, she creates an exercise that allows her, first, to discover whether there are differences in accounting standards across countries and, if so, how these differences affect financial statements. Second the exercise allows her to apply the differing standards to a real life example so she can see the absolute and comparative monetary effects of expanding into a selected set of countries.
Martin et al. (1998) studied this question.