Mr Klinz is a former member of the European Parliament. He was Chairman of the Special Committee on the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis (CRIS) and sat on the European Parliament's Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs (ECON). He is due to take office after his nomination is submitted to the European Parliament and Council and after appointment by the General Assembly of EFRAG. The decision was announced in today's issue of the European Commission Midday Express and is documented of the EFRAG page of the European Commission.

Sir David Tweedie’s appetite for unifying standards around the world continues to be voracious. Having spent a decade of his life sorting out accounting standards in the UK and a decade applying himself to international financial reporting standards, he is now engrossed in trying to bring unity to valuation standards. And, as he says in a new video interview, his motivation and enthusiasm remain undimmed.

'I feel exactly the same way about valuation standards as I did about accounting standards', he says. 'If we have a method of valuing something in Britain why should it be different for the same thing in America, Australia, France, or wherever? We should all do it in the same way'. Without that he sees problems ahead. The objective should be for everyone to follow whichever standards are deemed and accepted to be the best. 'I believe that for accounting and it is exactly the same for valuation. We shouldn’t have different valuation standards. And if we have IFRS worldwide and we are having big differences in valuations we are going to get big differences in accounts for exactly the same transactions'.

It is classic Tweedie. 'Here's the guys with the pointy heads and the whirling eyes, astrophysicists and so on', he remarks. 'We have to say: "Wait a minute. What are you doing in your little black box?" We have to bring this out and shine a light on it and see what is happening'.

And for those who suggest that the existing IFRS should cover the problem he has an admission. 'I was fairly naïve as Chairman of the IASB', he says. 'I assumed with IFRS 13 there was a fair value and people were just going to use it. And then we discover there is one fair value here and another one there, for exactly the same thing. That is where the problem came in. So suddenly you realise that where you think you are standardising with the range of variation you are not really. What IFRS 13 does is say this is how you do a fair value but it doesn't go into the detail that you require to get the numbers shrunk to an acceptable level of agreement'.

This is why he is worried. 'We are finding that financial institutions are getting quite different, wide, variations in the value of these identical instruments', he says. 'That instantly worries you because if some of them are hugely different, and we know they are, you have a situation where you don't know how reliable the balance sheet is, and the balance sheet clearly affects the income statement, so how reliable is the profit number? And then if we talk about financial stability, which is based on the capital buffers, based on balance sheet numbers, are those rubbish, or do they mean something?'

It is a familiar Tweedie argument. 'We just haven't got the numbers', he says. 'There is a lacuna in the regulatory system at the moment'. And that means danger for all. 'It is a danger for the financial system. It's a danger to reputational risk for regulators. And it is also a danger for auditors'. The narrowing of this gap is what he hopes the work of the IVSC can achieve. 'You will never get the values down to three decimal places', he says, 'but if we can narrow it to somewhere around 5 to 10% that would be OK. But it's way, way above that at the moment'.

His plan is to get everyone involved, regulators, auditors, banks and standard-setters. 'Then we could look at what is causing the differences, what are the assumptions, where the data comes from', he says. The aim would be to get to a place where everyone was dealing with the same sort of information in a similar manner and so would be getting similar sorts of numbers. He reckons it will take three years. 'The whole [global] industry needs to come together', he says. And it will need the backing of the authorities to achieve it. 'The regulators', he says, 'will have to say: "You’re all going to do this"'.

On 20 June 2013, the IASB issued a revised exposure draft that establishes the principles that insurers should apply to report the nature, amount, timing and uncertainty of cash flows from insurance contracts. The IASB has substantially completed all issues related to the accounting for insurance contracts without participation features. It will review the accounting for insurance contracts with participation features to determine whether addition modifications are needed before it completes the project. A new standard is expected after 2015.

For more in­for­ma­tion, see the document on the IASB’s website. In addition, Deloitte has followed the re­de­lib­er­a­tions of the IASB and all tentative decisions to date; see our insurance contracts project page for details.

The Secretary General of AAOIFI stated that the AAOIFI hopes "that collaboration with the IASB will lead to greater uniformity and transparency of financial reporting by Islamic financial institutions across the world". Only recently, a survey of the Asian-Oceanian Standard-Setters Group (AOSSG) had revealed that comparability of Islamic financial institutions' financial statements needs to be improved.

Please click for more information on the outreach event, which will take place in Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain, on the AAOIFI website.

Note (added 13 April 2015): After the event, the AAOIFI published a press release on its website saying that “the meeting was extremely helpful in strenghthening cooperation between AAOIFI and the IASB towards better understanding of issues relating to accounting standards for the Islamic finance industry”.

In his speech, Mr Hoogervorst went into more detail on three aspects of pension accounting. He first visited the question of whether the IASB relies too much on fair value measurement in its standards and whether this would lead to too much market volatility, which would not serve the long-term perspective of long-term investors. Mr Hoogervorst admitted that "short-termism is rife across the financial markets" but also added that "markets can get things very wrong". He encouraged long-term investors not to be deterred by short-term market fluctuations and investment fads but to use fair values as a means to evaluate continuously how changes in the market may affect the ability to achieve the goals of a long-term investment strategy.

In the same vein, Mr Hoogervorst then turned to recent amendments of IAS 19 Employee Benefits. With reissuing IAS 19 in 2011, the IASB removed the so-called 'corridor method' of deferring the recognition of actuarial gains and losses effective 1 January 2013. Mr Hoogervorst stressed that as a result, the balance sheet pension asset or liability now represented the actual funding position. He claimed that investors generally saw this as an improvement.

Lastly, Mr Hoogervorst commented on the fact that pension schemes were currently being transformed in a very rapid fashion and hybrid pension schemes were on the rise. While these schemes might be more affordable to companies, they make the accounting for them more difficult. The binary approach of IAS 19 (defined benefit vs defined contribution) was difficult to uphold vis-à-vis "this new, infinitely variable pension landscape" Mr Hoogervorst said. He therefore pointed at the IASB's research project on pension accounting that aims at developing an approach to pension accounting that works for all types of schemes.

Please click to download the full text of Mr Hoogervorst's speech from the IASB website.