Board work plan update: This is the first periodical update of the work plan, replacing the research update. The staff have been reviewing the timing of consultation documents and recommend some changes to the timing of consultations (such as delaying the management commentary ED until May 2021) and extending some comment periods (such as for the DP on BCUCC). The work plan on the IFRS Foundation website will be updated after the meeting.
2020 Agenda Consultation: The IASB is preparing to issue a Request for Information (RFI) in the first quarter of 2021, as part of the public consultation on its work plan that it is required to undertake every five years. The staff has completed its work and recommend that the RFI describe 27 potential projects identified from outreach undertaken.
Maintenance and Consistent Application—Deferred Tax related to Assets and Liabilities arising from a Single Transaction: In July 2019, the Board published an ED proposing amendments to IAS 12. The staff recommend that the Board confirm the proposal to narrow the scope of the recognition exemption so that it would not apply to transactions that give rise to equal amounts of taxable and deductible temporary differences. The papers include recommendations about the capping proposal, the extent of application guidance and illustrative examples and transition.
Management Commentary: This is the last decision-making meeting for the ED. The staff are asking for permission to begin the formal drafting and balloting processes. The staff papers include the working draft of their guidance on the provision of information about matters that could affect an entity’s long-term prospects, intangible resources and relationships, and ESG matters, but this is to elicit feedback rather than seeking any formal decisions. The ED is expected to be published in May 2021, if the IASB approves the revised work plan.
Extractive activities: The staff will present findings on the diversity of accounting policies applied to exploration and evaluation expenditure within the scope of IFRS 6. The staff’s research indicates that diversity is primarily due to the extent to which an entity recognises exploration and evaluation expenditure incurred during the reporting period as an asset and the unit of account that an entity decides to apply to its exploration and evaluation expenditure asset. Most of the entities in the sample use ‘area of interest’ accounting. The ‘full cost’ and ‘successful efforts’ methods are the most common accounting policies for oil and gas companies not applying ‘area of interest’ accounting. The Board is not being asked to make any decisions.
Equity Method: Work on reviewing aspects of IAS 28 began in May. The staff recommend that the objective of this review be to assess whether application problems with the equity method for associates and joint ventures can be addressed by identifying and explaining the principles of IAS 28. They recommend that the Board not consider whether the equity method is a one-line consolidation method or a measurement method, whether it should be replaced by one of the measurement bases in the Conceptual Framework or whether significant influence should be the basis for when to apply the equity method.
Disclosure Initiative, Subsidiaries that are SMEs: The IASB is developing a Standard setting out reduced disclosure requirements for subsidiaries that apply IFRS Standards but meet the definition of an SME. At this meeting the IASB will discuss whether the compliance statement required by IAS 1 should differentiate the entities that have applied the reduced disclosure requirements and whether the disclosure requirements of IAS 8 should be applied by these entities.
Oral Updates: The staff will give oral updates on Dynamic Risk Management and the IFRS Taxonomy.
More information
Our pre-meeting summaries are available on our October meeting note page and will be supplemented with our popular meeting notes after the meeting.