Mr. Schnurr began his tenure in October 2014 but suffered injuries from a serious bicycle accident in April 2016. Mr. Bricker assumed the role of interim chief accountant in July 2016.

For more information, see the press releases on Mr. Schnurr’s retirement and Mr. Bricker’s appointment on the SEC’s Web site.

If there was a theme running through the stories of all the winners of this year’s Finance for the Future Awards it was surely the focus on the impact that the efforts of the organisations concerned was creating. Bridges Ventures, which triumphed in the investment and financing category, was all about impact investing, bringing together social investors wanting to foster social impact with social enterprises wishing to grow. The success of water and waste water company United Utilities, which won the newly established Communicating Integrated Thinking award, was all about how the company was reaping the benefits from all the ways that integrated thinking had transformed both its processes and performance. The award for Innovative New Idea went to the Public Services Lab, (PSL), a consortium of organisations on Merseyside which were bringing their different but complementary skills together to create a collaborative approach to rethinking the way that public services could be delivered. Everywhere the world was being turned upside down.

‘It’s really hard’ said Bridges’ investment director, Caroline Tulloch, ‘to combine traditional financial structures and models of socially-focused businesses, and entrepreneurs’. ‘We changed the way we were working’, said United Utilities CFO Russ Houlden, ‘and we needed to communicate that to all of our stakeholders, particularly our investors, our customers and the society around us’. ‘This is a partnership between a number of different organisations’, said Chris Wright, CEO of Catch22, one of the organisations in the consortium, PSL, ‘and the idea is that we bring our collective expertise, energy, drive, and imagination to the fore to encourage others to step up and come up with solutions around the future of public service delivery’.

And this theme stretched across all of the winners. The Climate Disclosure Standards Board, CDSB, was a good example. Collaboration, for them, became the solution. ‘There was this gap in the market’, said managing director, Mardi McBrien. ‘We had climate change. We had investors who said they couldn’t use the information in the market. We had companies saying there were way too many ways to report that information and what did we want them to do. We had Governments saying: “We can’t regulate that yet”. So CDSB’s objective was to harmonise all these different interests into one place, our framework, and try and reconcile all those different objectives’. Collaboration was the only way forward. ‘It’s all about collaboration’, said McBrien. ‘It’s about bringing different disciplines and different ideas together, sharing experiences, testing things out, putting it onto the market, accepting the feedback, and trying again’. This lesson also shone through the highly commended award for HM Treasury in the public sector category. This was all about how the accounts of over 6,000 entities in the public sector were brought together to create one set of consolidated accounts for the whole of the public sector. This was a unique challenge which will create an impact which has profound consequences. ‘One of the big benefits of pulling all of the assets and liabilities into one place’, said Vicky Rock, head of government financial reporting at HM Treasury, ‘is that you can use that to assess the long-term sustainability of the public finances. So we have been working with the Office for Budget Responsibility on this and going wider than their definitions by putting in provisions, putting in guarantees, putting in contingent liabilities, to start to say how the Government’s balance sheet is going to evolve over time. What are the scale of these liabilities? How are they going to be paid for? And this is leading to changes in how policies are made in Government’.

And the range and the geographic reach of the finalists around the world emphasised how ideas of sustainability, integrated reporting and thinking, and collaborative efforts between the old silos of information within organisations are being brought together. From the social and environmental outcomes of the expansion of Auckland Airport to the way mobile banking was overcoming financial exclusion amongst the 110 million people of Pakistan, from the transformative integrated thinking at global healthcare company Novo Nordisk to the ultimate winner of the large business award, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling, the story was the same. ‘It really teaches you lots of lessons about collaborative working and collaborative thinking’, said Basak Kotler, director, investor relations at Coca-Cola.

Currently in Yemen, IFRS is required by all banking institution and large and medium-sized companies. All other companies are permitted to use IFRS. The licensing agreement is considered an important step towards incorporating IFRS into Yemen’s legal framework.

For more information, see our Yemen jurisdiction page.

The report — prepared by the Chair of the IFRS Advisory Council, Joanna Perry — notes the following discussions:

• Scope of the Primary Financial Statements research project — The Members of the Council agreed that there is a tension between flexibility and comparability, and although they supported providing more guidance they warned against that guidance being too descriptive. Alternative performance measures were discussed as a topic the Board cannot ignore.
• Implementation support for the new insurance contracts standard — The Members of the Council agreed that the use of a transition resource group is appropriate; however all of the available tools for implementation support should be used.
• Key performance indicators for the IFRS Foundation — The Members of the Council considered and provided advice in relation to potential key performance indicators that could be used by the IFRS Foundation to monitor certain aspects of its work. The main message was that the Foundation should focus on the quality of the standard-setting process and outreach and that it will be important to keep the key performance indicators simple and focused.
• Implications of the Brexit for the IFRS Foundation — The Members of the Council agreed that although there is a lot of uncertainty there are no immediate matters that the IFRS Foundation needs to address.

The next meeting of the IFRS Advisory Council is scheduled for 4–5 April 2017, in London. The full report on the council’s October/November meeting is available on the IASB's website.

This issue features:

• Views from Dennis Jullens, Lecturer at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and a Capital Markets Advisory member.
• A look at the amendments to IFRS 4 arising from the implementation of IFRS 9.
• An update on the IASB work plan.
• In­for­ma­tion on current events and investor feedback.

The Investor Update newslet­ter is available on the IASB’s website.

The meeting was chaired by IASB member Darrel Scott and discusssed:

• IAS 37 Provisions, Contingent Liabilities and Contingent Assets;
• Post-implementation review of IFRS 13 Fair Value Measurement; and
• IAS 27 Separate Financial Statements - Financial statements of subsidiaries.

Members also expressed their sadness at the passing of former Chair Wayne Upton and acknowledged his contributions to the establishment and continuing success of the EEG.

Please click for access to the communiqué on the IASB website.

And in a video interview with Robert Bruce he has reflected on what has been achieved in that time under his leadership. 

Probably his most important achievement over those years is how the concept of integrated thinking is now moving towards being a mainstream benefit of an integrated reporting system. Under Druckman’s vigorous encouragement the reporting system which companies operate has evolved into something which is not just a means of communicating what a company has done and how it has done it but a lead motivator for change within companies. He sees it as part of what he calls ‘a new information architecture’ which will sit well alongside and within changing attitudes in the corporate governance world. Once everything was geared around the financials, he says. Now we are seeing a broader form of value creation with integrated reporting, a multi-capital system, which will drive a more inclusive and responsible capitalism. It is no longer simply about trust and KPIs, or about delivering a broader based prosperity. It’s about all three. And, he underlines, the momentum is probably unstoppable.

Druckman’s five years as chief executive have all been about that momentum. He feels that at the outset they had the right idea at the right time. And bringing about a coalition of ideas around a common aim meant that early adopters of integrated reporting provided the encouragement and example. And off the back of that the cumulative effect of its growth has been influential. He argues that the implementation of the concept of a Strategic Report in the UK would not have been as successful without the ideas that the growth of integrated reporting had brought into the mainstream. And the influence has been worldwide. He points to the strength and success of integrated reporting in, for example, Japan, in Singapore, and in Germany.

One of the great strengths of the integrated reporting model is, he says, the fact that the integrated reporting framework is not a product. It is a mission-driven system. It has not relied on regulatory imposition of any sort. And, as he repeatedly said during his five years as Chief Executive the process has been an evolution, not a revolution. It is a shift to a world of trust, transparency, credibility and understanding. It needs regulatory support but the jury is out whether it needs reporting standards to encourage a degree of uniformity in its practice.

But he does feel some disappointment from his five years that at times development, momentum and innovation were partly blunted by ownership issues. Organisational egos sometimes got in the way, he said, and efforts could be stifled by organisations doing great things but not connecting up.

And as Druckman stepped down there were three areas he drew attention to as being both successful but needing further attention. The recently established Corporate Reporting Dialogue is one. This has been, he says, one of the biggest achievements of the IIRC. It too has been about bringing the standard-setting, financial and sustainability worlds together after years, as he points out, of being very siloed communities.

The second is the need for the accounting profession to embrace the changes integrated reporting is bringing about and to embed them in the educational processes of accountants. He sees the profession as being at a point of great soul-searching at the moment. Are they primarily compliance people? Will much of their work eventually be done by robots? Or will accountants go back to earlier days when they fulfilled the role of trusted advisor to business? He sees integrated reporting and integrated thinking as being fundamental to the role of being a trusted advisor, a professional accountant.

And the third part of the great changes he identified is simply in the transformational power of integrated thinking. Integrated thinking, he says, is articulated by an integrated report but value creation cannot be achieved by only a report. It has to be embedded in the business. Producing an integrated report changes behaviours. It really makes you think, he says. It asks what value you have created. It enables companies to make changes in their structure and their management. But it also acts as a tool which encourages people to challenge their strategy and what they are doing. It is a very different way of embedding and bringing about change.

And as for Druckman’s future he envisages a bit more golf and reducing the almost constant travelling around the world to exhort, encourage, and build momentum. Instead he sees himself in a role of looking at the broader areas of corporate reporting and the development of the capital markets system. For him it is all about delivering a broader based prosperity. Hardly a modest goal.

Standard-setting and related projects

• Disclosure initiative: materiality practice statement — the issuance of the practice statement is now expected after 6 months.

Narrow-scope amendments and IFRIC Interpretations

• Property, plant and equipment: proceeds before intended use (proposed amendments to IAS 16) — the issuance of an exposure draft is now expect within 6 months.
• Uncertainty over income tax treatments — the issuance of an IFRIC Interpretation is now expected within 6 months.

IFRS Taxonomy

• The proposed updates for Common Practice — Agriculture, leisure, franchises and retail and Common Practice — Banks are now expected in December.

Agenda consultation

• IASB Work Plan 2017–2021: Feedback statement on the 2015 Agenda Consultation was added to the work plan.

The revised IASB work plan is available on the IASB's website.

According to the press release, the meeting will feature the following sessions:

Please click for the full press release on the KASB website and more information on the meeting on the AOSSG website.

One of the topics discussed was the work of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD). TCFD Chair Michael Bloomberg and Mary Schapiro, Special Adviser to the Chair, presented an update to the Plenary on the work of the industry-led TCFD. The presentation included a summary of the recommended voluntary disclosures and guidance developed by the TCFD, which will be released for public consultation in December 2016. The final report will be published by June 2017. The FSB welcomed the progress of the TCFD in finalising recommendations, given the importance of effective risk disclosures, and encouraged firms to respond to the TCFD’s forthcoming consultation.

For the full workplan and topics discussed please see the press release on the FSB website.