Pre-meeting summaries for the March IASB meeting

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13 Mar 2017

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) will meet at its offices in London on 21–22 March 2017. 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.

There are eight topics on the agenda.

Tuesday 21 March

The IASB will consider corporate reporting more broadly. Until now the IASB has been monitoring developments in corporate reporting, including integrated reporting, sustainability and the recent work on climate-related disclosures, and cooperating with other bodies. The staff recommendation is that the IASB take a more active role in thinking about broader corporate reporting issues. As a first step, the IASB should look to review and update its Practice Statement on Management Commentary.

The IASB has a brief session to review its work on goodwill and impairment, primarily for information and planning purposes.

The IASB will review its work on discount rates, one of its research projects. The staff are recommending that the project be closed, with no further work required other than to ensure that the analysis is properly documented and retained on the IASB’s website. This does not prevent the IASB discussing low and negative interest rates, which it plans to do later in 2017.

The IASB will continue its discussions on Primary Financial Statements. The staff are recommending that entities be required to have a subtotal in the income statement for EBIT. They know that this will require future discussion of what constitutes finance income and expense from ordinary activities and how earnings from associates fits in. The staff are also recommending that entities be permitted to present a measure of operating performance, using their own definition. The papers also discuss the general aggregation principles.

The IASB will conclude its public discussions on the Conceptual Framework. The staff are recommending that entities that have rely on the Framework to develop policies for regulatory account balances be required to continue to use the existing Framework until they apply the future Standard on rate-regulated activities.

There will be a brief oral update on the Insurance Contracts project.

Wednesday 22 March

The IASB will have an education session on Dynamic Risk Management. The staff plan is to have the IASB identify a preferred model by about October 2017, which would then be developed further.

The financial instruments with the characteristics of equity project will wrap up its current phase. The IASB will discuss how the proposed model would apply to derivatives in an entity’s own equity in a group scenario when the functional currency of the parent differs from that of the subsidiary. They will also assess the implications of the model for other Standards, particularly IFRS 2 Share-based Payments and IAS 33 Earnings per Share. The next step is the preparation of the Discussion Paper.

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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