IFRS in Focus — Insurance contracts (August 2010)
On 30 July 2010, the International Accounting Standard Board (IASB) published Exposure Draft ED/2010/8 Insurance Contracts (the ED).
This ED represents an important milestone in the Phase II of the IASB’s project to revise fundamentally IFRS 4 Insurance Contracts. A project on insurance contract accounting has been ongoing since 1997 and the ED of IFRS 4 Phase II finally proposes a consistent standard for all insurance and reinsurance contracts, both life and non-life. Since the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) joined the project in October 2008, the landscape of Phase II has been rapidly evolving into a key convergence project, with the result that the FASB will be publishing the IASB’s ED in the coming weeks as a Discussion Paper to seek the views of US constituents on the proposed IFRS model.
