Pre-meeting summaries for the March IASB meeting

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08 Mar, 2019

The IASB will meet at its offices in London on 12–14 March 2019. 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 Board will consider the remaining topics in its review of concerns raised by stakeholders in relation to IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts: credit cards that provide insurance cover; transition requirements—risk mitigation option; implications for disclosure; and transition requirements. The staff are recommending some changes be made to IFRS 17 and IFRS 9 Financial Instruments. The Board will consider the package of amendments as a whole in its April 2019 meeting.

The staff recommend that the Board proceed to publish an Exposure Draft (in April or May) with proposed amendments to IFRS 9 Financial Instruments and IAS 39 Financial Instruments: Recognition and Measurement to address the uncertainty introduced by IBOR reform.  Because this is an urgent matter, the comment period would be 45 days.

As part of the Disclosure Initiative the staff have developed two examples they think will help those preparing financial statements avoid explaining their accounting polices using boilerplate or generic descriptions or simply repeating the requirements of IFRS Standards. The examples would be included in the Materiality Practice Statement.

The Board will discuss two remaining issues in relation to the Exposure Draft Classification of Liabilities (as current or non-current). The staff are recommending refinements to the proposal in relation to classification of liabilities with equity-settlement features and classification of loans for which the right to defer settlement is subject to lending conditions that will not be tested until after the end of the reporting period.

The Board will continue its discussions of Business Combinations under Common Control by considering whether to develop a current value approach for all or some transactions that affect non-controlling interest (NCI) in the receiving entity (discussed in the December 2018 Agenda Paper 23) and a different approach, such as a predecessor approach, for transactions that affect lenders and other creditors in the receiving entity but do not affect NCI.

In the Primary Financial Statements project the staff are recommending that the Board require the separate presentation of several items in the primary financial statements (such as, in the statement of financial position, goodwill and investment in “integral” and “non-integral” associates and joint ventures accounted for using the equity method). However, they recommend that entities not be required to present amortisation, depreciation and research and development expenditure in the statement(s) of financial performance. They also recommend that entities be required to provide information about unusual items presented in the statement(s) of financial performance.

The staff will provide an overview of the feedback it has analysed in relation to the Discussion Paper on Financial Instruments with Characteristics of Equity.

The 2015 Agenda Consultation led to a project to consider whether subsidiaries that are SMEs should be permitted to apply IFRS standards with reduced disclosures. The staff paper sets out the objective of the project and provides some background information.

The staff will update the Board on progress in the Extractive Activities project, setting out the more significant developments in extractive activities since the publication of a Discussion Paper by the IASB in 2010. 

The staff recommends that in reviewing and revising the IFRS for SMEs Standard, that it should continue to be aligned with full IFRS Standards. This would mean updating the IFRS for SMEs Standard for new and amended IFRS Standards, while considering whether the changes to IFRS Standards are relevant to SMEs, if the requirements should be simplified and ensuring the outcome is proportionate.

More information

Our pre-meeting summaries are available on our March meeting note page and will be supplemented with our popular meeting notes after the meeting.

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