Pre-meeting summaries for the October IASB meeting
16 Oct, 2018
The IASB will meet on Wednesday 24 and Thursday 25 October 2018. We have posted our pre-meeting summaries for the meeting that allow you to follow the IASB’s decision making more closely. For each topic to be discussed we summarise the agenda papers made available by the IASB staff and point out the main issues to be discussed by the IASB and the staff recommendations.
The Wednesday sessions start with the Primary Financial Statements project. The focus is on the labels the Board will use to describe subtotals. The staff are recommending that the labels be operating profit or loss; operating profit or loss and share of profit or loss of integral associates and joint ventures; and profit or loss before financing and income tax (with entities being prohibited from using the term ‘EBIT’ for this subtotal).
On Implementation, the IASB will consider a recommendation by the IFRS Interpretations Committee that the IASB amend IAS 12 Income Taxes in relation to the initial recognition of a lease, by a lessee, and decommissioning obligations.
The staff will give an oral update on the Management Commentary project.
The staff will present a proposal to revise the Preface to International Financial Reporting Standards, removing redundant material on the structure of the IASB and its due process requirements.
For the Disclosure Initiative, the focus is on accounting policies. The staff recommend that the Board clarify that not all accounting policies relating to material transactions, other events or conditions are material. They also recommend that the Board develop guidance and examples for inclusion in the Materiality Practice Statement to help entities apply effective judgement when deciding whether accounting policies are material.
The Board will discuss IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts, to help it determine how it should respond to concerns that have been brought to its attention regarding this Standard (the papers include a description of 25 identified concerns). The staff have developed criteria for the Board to apply in assessing whether, in each case, it should propose an amendment to IFRS 17. We do not expect the Board to make any decisions about specific issues at this meeting.
On Thursday the staff will give an update on the Rate-regulated Activities project.
The meeting concludes with a session on Goodwill and Impairment. The staff present their proposed outline for a Discussion Paper. The main sections would focus on improving disclosures, simplifying the impairment test, and simplifying the accounting for goodwill. The staff are asking the Board to reconsider its earlier decisions not to pursue some ideas around improvements to the impairment test. The Board has not indicated when it expects to publish the DP.
More information
Our pre-meeting summaries are available on our October meeting note page and will be supplemented with our popular meeting notes after the meeting.
