Drug majors protest FASB legal cost disclosure plan

Six pharmaceutical majors have sent a letter to the US Financial Accounting Standards Board objecting to a proposal that would require companies to disclose estimated costs of all ongoing litigation, reports the Wall Street Journal.

US drug majors Pfizer, Merck & Co, Eli Lilly, Wyeth, health care giant Johnson & Johnson and Swiss major Novartis, claim that such an estimate would be pointless, expensive and would fail to provide meaningful information to investor, according to the WSJ.

In the letter to the FASB, the companies said estimating the costs of ongoing litigation was "highly subjective, subject to huge swings as underlying assumptions change, and unlikely to provide financial statement users with meaningful or reliable information."