The Director of Research informed the Board that Agenda Paper 8, General Update, illustrated the status of the research programme. He said that the Request for Views for the 2015 Agenda Consultation introduced a new classification of research projects. They will henceforth be categorised in assessment stage, development stage and inactive projects. On the research project for the primary financial statements, he informed the Board that the staff was performing research in the background and that it could take several months until the project would be ready for discussion at the IASB. He also said that most of the other projects were likely to result in some output in 2016 so he suggested that by the end of 2015, the IASB should decide the sequencing of those projects. He mentioned that the research project on discount rates would have its first Board discussion in this meeting and Board members should think about what form of output they would prefer and how the discount rate project interacted with other projects.

One Board member expressed concern that income taxes were now classified as an assessment stage project. He said that this should be reconsidered as the project comprised many issues which were hard to solve. The Director of Research replied that the project was in a very early stage of the assessment phase and that towards the end of 2015 the staff should be able to report back on how to address the issues. At this point it would be difficult to determine what the next stage would be.

One Board member found that the wording in the agenda paper about the project on the equity method was optimistic. The agenda paper stated that many of the implementation issues would be addressed by the narrow-scope project. He would prefer to state that ‘some’ of the issues would be addressed rather than ‘many’. The Director of Research acknowledged this point.

No further comments were made.