Deloitte comment letter on the IASB's proposed changes to accounting policies

Published on: Aug 02, 2018

We have responded to the IASB's exposure draft ED/2018/1 Accounting Policy Changes (proposed amendments to IAS 8) that was published in March 2018.

We do not support the proposals in the exposure draft as they do not address the root cause of these issues, being the tension between the status of agenda decisions per the IFRS Foundation’s Due Process Handbook (“helpful, informative and persuasive”) and their status in practice (with most securities regulators taking a position, whether publically or otherwise, that an accounting policy which conflicts with an agenda decision is, de facto, no longer acceptable). Indeed, by including multiple references to agenda decisions being ‘non-authoritative’ and changes in policy arising from them being ‘voluntary’ the proposed amendments to IAS 8 could exacerbate tensions already arising in practice. Agenda decisions fulfil, in practice, a similar and necessary function to Implementation Guidance appended to an IFRS, that of establishing an appropriate accounting treatment to be applied consistently in areas where IFRSs themselves are not explicit. If application of that treatment were treated as truly ‘voluntary’, the important aim of consistency in application would not be met.

This comment letter was released by our Global firm.

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