Amendments to IAS 14 Segment Reporting

Date recorded:

The Board continued its consideration of comments received from constituents on its proposals to align IFRS with US GAAP with respect to segment reporting, and its redeliberations of those proposals.

The Board confirmed the proposals in the ED with respect to the following matters:

 

  • The draft IFRS should not define the measures of segment revenues, segment expenses, segment results, segment assets and segment liabilities that are required to be disclosed.
  • Reconciliation at the individual segment level should not be required.
  • Segment information by individual country should not be required.
  • The Board should proceed with the consequential amendments to IAS 34 Interim Financial Reporting.
The staff also brought various minor matters to the Board's attention, none of which was discussed at the meeting. One item to note is that the effective date for the standard will be 1 January 2009 (not 2007 as exposed). Early adoption would be permitted.

 

The Board agreed to add a requirement that an entity should report a measure of liabilities for each reportable segment if those amounts are regularly provided to the chief operating decision maker. (This is a requirement additional to those in FAS 131.)

The Board discussed issues raised by the Publish What You Pay campaign related to disclosures at the individual country level. Many Board members were sympathetic to the campaign's objectives (transparency with respect to payments to governments in resource-rich countries, which are often less developed countries.) However, the Board noted that it was not appropriate to attempt to address their concerns in this project, which was a tightly-focused convergence project.

The Board agreed that the campaign's request was a legitimate and serious one, and one to which the Board should be responsive. The Board established a sub-group of the Board (Messrs Cope, Garnett and Gelard) to assist the staff in engaging the campaign and others that could be of assistance. As the matters raised by these constituents were political as well as technical, groups that should be involved include the IASCF Trustees, the International Public Sector Accounting Board, the International Monetary Fund and its agencies, the World Bank, IOSCO, and the Financial Stability Forum.

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