Pre-meeting summaries for the July 2020 IASB meeting

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16 Jul 2020

The IASB will meet via video conference on 22 and 23 July 2020 for its regular meeting. We have posted our pre-meeting summaries for the meetings 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.

Disclosure Initiative: Accounting Policies: In August 2019, the Board published the Exposure Draft (ED) Disclosure of Accounting Policies, which proposed amendments to IAS 1 and IFRS Practice Statement 2. At this meeting the staff recommend that the IASB amend the transition requirements to require entities to disclose material accounting policy information for the current period and disclose comparative accounting policy information if, applying IAS 1:38, it is relevant to understanding the current period’s financial statements. They also recommend that the amendments apply to annual reporting periods beginning on or after 1 January 2023 with early application permitted and that the effective date of the amendments to IAS 8 resulting from the Accounting Policies and Accounting Estimates project be changed to the same date.

Management Commentary: The Board will discuss potential guidance on reporting financial resources. The papers discuss requirements and possible supporting guidance on reporting progress in managing key matters, a disclosure objective for performance and position; and possible guidance supporting that objective, including on identifying key facets of performance and position that need to be addressed in management commentary. They also discuss measures and indicators.

Extractive activities: The staff papers summarise their assessment on how activities within the scope of IFRS 6 would be accounted for in the absence of that Standard, applying the requirements in IAS 16 and IAS 38.

The staff concluded that costs incurred during the exploration phases would not meet the requirements of IAS 16 or IAS 38 for recognition as an asset. The staff also assessed expenditure acquiring the legal rights from a third party and concluded that it could meet the definition of an intangible asset and the recognition criteria, but that application of IAS 36 without the specific requirements in IFRS 6:18-22 would generally lead to an immediate writeoff of exploration and evaluation assets. Applying the guidance in IAS 38:54-55, exploration and evaluation expenditure incurred subsequent to the acquisition of the legal right would be recognised as an expense as it is incurred.

Maintenance and Consistent Application - Lack of exchangeability: In April the IASB decided on how to amend IAS 21 to address the accounting when the spot exchange rate is not observable (because of a lack of exchangeability between two currencies). At this meeting the staff are recommending that the proposed changes be applied prospectively. They also recommend that the ED be open for comment for 120 days.

IBOR Reform and the Effects on Financial Reporting: The IASB will discuss feedback on the proposals for qualifying hedging relationships and groups of items. The staff recommend that the IASB permit, rather than require, entities to reset cumulative fair values to zero for the purpose of performing the retrospective effectiveness assessment as proposed in paragraph 102S of the ED and confirm the proposals in the ED related to the accounting for qualifying hedging relationships subject clarifications and drafting suggestions as explained in the staff analysis. That completes the deliberations and, if the IASB agrees, the staff expect to finalise the amendments.

IFRS Taxonomy: The staff will report on plans to update the IFRS Taxonomy for the COVID-19-Related amendments to IFRS 16. There is no paper for this session.

More information

Our pre-meeting summaries are available on our July meeting notes page and will be supplemented with our popular meeting notes after the meeting.

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