A little while I blogged a round-up of what the finance directors I'd been speaking to recently believed were the housekeeping tasks a finance team should be undertaking regularly to ensure the continuing viability of their employers: Cash was (and remains) king; managing and, where possible, removing risk; and so on.

One I left out was impairment. Fortunately, there's a great piece on CFO.com that tackles this.

In it, General Motors controller Nick Cyprus explains that while most companies look at impairments annually, GM now is doing it continuously.

'Understanding where you might have hidden impairments that you didn't think about in the past is a trick,' he says.

And Cyprus advises his peers to ensure they know (or find out) which of their assets might be illiquid and how long they'll be staying on the balance sheet. 'The only way to maintain credibility with the audit committee is to give a heads-up of where you have trouble and not let the auditors catch you at the end,' he says.

He's right. And while auditors sometimes come under fire for failing to ask the obvious questions, few should fail to be so dogged this time around. Hopefully.

In a nice irony, as the article points out, Cyprus was speaking at a financial reporting conference in New York on Monday - 24 hours before his 'boss's boss flew to Washington to ask for billions of dollars worth of government money to keep the company going'.