Livent Inc.: Accounting for Pre-Production Costs

Livent Inc. is the only publicly traded theatrical production firm in North America. A member of the audit committee at Livent is preparing to address the company's board of directors regarding issues contained in a letter published by a leading business magazine. The letter, written by a securities analyst, suggests the company's accounting policies are "very aggressive," in particular the approach taken to capitalize and amortize its pre-production costs. In order to address this issue, the audit committee member wants to review the company's current capitalization and amortization policies and to compare its approach with the accounting policies used by other industries which also incur significant development costs.