Bob Laux is a financial reporting guru. A couple of years ago, at a panel event in Los Angeles he surprised everyone by saying he was "disgusted" at the state of the accounting profession. He was saying it for effect. But he needed to shout loudly to draw his audience’s attention to his view that financial reporting in the US had become a rolling mass of infrastructure, which didn’t really serve its users very well.

And when we talked recently, he talked about how "discouraged" he was by his profession, the accounting profession. "We are a great profession but we can do better", he said. "In the US we have periodic reporting, the 10Qs and 10Ks, and a tremendous amount of effort is put into those documents. There is a lot of infrastructure and controls on top of them. It is a huge infrastructure. It is rules. It is a lot of disclosure, documents which run to well over a hundred pages that I don’t think too many people are reading and may be not their first source for investing".

So how could he combat this massive obstacle? His answer is that "we are just going to have to be smart about it". And that, for Laux, means integrated reporting, reporting based on the different capitals which underpin value creation of a company. "We have been talking about this type of reporting for over two decades now. We have come a long way. But now is the time for action".

Read the entire column on our Global IAS Plus site.

It is the traditional Catch-22 of financial disclosure. Create a mass of requirements and all you will see is checklist and boilerplate information. Remove some of the requirements in an attempt to encourage judgement and what you get is complaints from investors that they are being denied information. Furthermore, if you want a degree of consistency, preparers need disclosure objectives to exercise their judgement.

There is also the question of whether you need to write out principles about good communication, or whether it should be down to common sense.

Although the debate has been with us for many years this is the IASB’s first attempt to step back, rethink and try to steer an effective way through these issues. The IASB has produced a discussion paper on Principles of Disclosure.

It all comes down to a deceptively simple question: deciding what to disclose and how to disclose it.

The discussion paper leaves everyone with a lot to think about. There are complexities and uncertainties. Will it be possible to create more structure? What role should management judgement be allowed to play? The next six months gives everyone an opportunity to put their views across.

Read the entire column on our Global IAS Plus site.

Below is an analysis of all changes made to the work plan since the last update in February 2017.

Research projects

• Disclosure initiative: Principles of Disclosure — the discussion paper is now expected in March (which, given the month is almost over, translates into "next week")

Standard-setting and related projects

• Disclosure initiative: Materiality (practice statement) — the expected publication of the practice statement has moved forward and is now given as June 2017
• Disclosure initiative: Materiality (amendments to IAS 1 and IAS 8) — the expected publication of proposed amendments has also moved to June 2017

Nar­row-scope amend­ments

• Improvements to IFRS 8 resulting from the post-implementation review of IFRS 8 — no change in timing, but the expected publication of an exposure draft in March also means it will be published next week

Interpretations

• IAS 12 — Accounting for uncertainties in income taxes — the expected publication of a final interpretation has moved forward and is now given as June 2017

Post-implementation reviews

• Post-implementation review of IFRS 13 — the expected publication of a request for information has moved forward and is now given as May 2017

The revised IASB work plan is available on the IASB's website.