Company: ABBV
Filing Date: 2025-02-14
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001551152-25-000020
Chunk: 369

Company: AbbVie Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-14
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 8
Chunk 369
---
 with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical Audit Matters

The critical audit matters communicated below are matters arising from the current period audit of the financial statements that were communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relate to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the consolidated financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matters below, providing separate opinions on the critical audit matters or on the accounts or disclosures to which they relate.

101     |  2024 Form 10-K

Sales rebate accruals for Medicaid, Medicare and managed care programsDescription of the MatterAs discussed in Note 2 to the consolidated financial statements under the caption “Revenue Recognition,” the Company established provisions for sales rebates in the same period the related product is sold. At December 31, 2024, the Company had $14,304 million in sales rebate accruals, a large portion of which were for rebates accrued for pharmacy benefit managers, state government Medicaid programs, insurance companies that administer Medicare drug plans and private entities for Medicaid, Medicare and managed care programs. In order to establish the rebate accruals, the Company estimated its rebates based on estimates and assumptions, including the determination of the related payer of the rebate based on sales trends, changes in rebate contracts which impacts the applicable price and rebate terms, and the corresponding lag in payment timing.Auditing the Medicaid, Medicare and managed care sales rebate accruals was complex and required significant auditor judgment because the accruals consider multiple subjective and complex estimates and assumptions. In deriving these estimates and assumptions, the Company used both internal and external sources of information. Management supplemented its historical data analysis with qualitative adjustments based upon changes in