Board Work Plan Update: This is a regular update for the Board. The Board decided to increase the comment period 30 days for the ED Regulatory Assets and Regulatory Liabilities, because of ongoing challenges from the pandemic and the volume of consultation documents out for comment. They also decided to have longer consultation periods for two documents due to be released shortly—ED Targeted Standards-level Review of Disclosures from 180 days to 210 days (rather than the 270 days proposed) and the Request for Information on the Third Agenda Consultation from 120 days to 180 days.

Management Commentary: The Board decided that the comment letter period for the forthcoming ED to revise Practice Statement 1 Management Commentary should be set to avoid overlapping with other projects and (possibly) to avoid publication at the same time as the Trustees consultation on sustainability reporting.

Equity Method: The staff updated the Board on the equity method research project. The staff have compiled from various sources 71 application questions for consideration. Using the project scope decided by the Board in October 2020, the staff plan to consider only those issues that can be resolved without fundamentally rewriting IAS 28 or amending other Standards. The staff consider that issues not meeting these criteria should not be considered in this project and that issues should be removed if they are not important or do not affect the consistent application of IAS 28. Board members suggested that the criteria be used as guidelines and not imposed strictly.

Goodwill and Impairment: In March 2020, the Board published Discussion Paper DP/2020/1 Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment. During the comment period, Board members and the staff attended 94 meetings with outside parties, received feedback from its consultative bodies, recorded two webinars, conducted fieldwork and received 193 comment letters. The Board discussed a high-level summary of the feedback received on the DP but no decisions were made.

Maintenance and Consistent Application: The Board discussed the latest IFRIC Update. No decisions were made.

Primary Financial Statements: The Board discussed detailed feedback on three topics: Subtotals in the statement of profit or loss—operating profit; scope of management performance measures (MPMs); and statement of cash flows. The Board decided to proceed with the proposal to require all entities to present an operating profit subtotal. The operating category would include volatile and unusual income and expenses arising from an entity’s operations. The Board decided to proceed with the proposal to include information about measures meeting the definition of MPMs in the financial statements and explore possible approaches to expand the scope of MPMs to include measures other than subtotals of income and expenses. The Board also decided to proceed with the limited proposals in the ED in relation to cash flows and make no additions to the scope of the work. 

IFRS for SMEs: The Board decided to move the project from its research programme to its standard-setting work plan, treating alignment with IFRS Standards as the starting point, applying the principles of relevance to SMEs, simplicity and faithful representation in determining whether and how that alignment should take place. The next step should be an ED.

Please click to access the detailed notes taken by Deloitte observers for the entire meeting.