Pre-meeting summaries for the November 2020 IASB meeting

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11 Nov 2020

The IASB will meet via video conference on 18 November for its regular meeting and on 19 November it will meet jointly with the FASB in an educational 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.

IASB meeting

Board work plan update: Last month the Board decided to begin the post-implementation review (PIR) of the IFRS 9 classification and measurement requirements and reconsider at a later date when to begin the PIRs of the IFRS 9 impairment and hedge accounting requirements and of IFRS 15. The staff recommend considering the start dates of those PIRs in the second half of 2021.

Post-implementation review of IFRS 10, IFRS 11 and IFRS 12: The staff will ask to Board to confirm the publication of the request for information (RFI), with a 180-day comment period. The RFI is expected to be published in December.

Maintenance and Consistent Application—Deferred Tax related to Assets and Liabilities arising from a Single Transaction: The Board is finalising amendments to IAS 12. The staff recommend an effective date of 1 January 2023 for the amendments—this will be 18 months after the expected issue date of the amendments in the second quarter of 2021.

Management Commentary: The staff have raised some issues identified during drafting of the Exposure Draft (“sweep issues”). The staff recommend that entities not applying IFRS should be permitted to apply the Practice Statement. The staff also recommend using the term ‘accuracy’ rather than ‘freedom of error’.

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 staff will propose exceptions to the process for adapting disclosure requirements for matters identified by staff when preparing the analysis of adaptions to the disclosure requirements of the IFRS for SMEs Standard or during the Board member’s review of that analysis.

Joint IASB—FASB education meeting

The purpose of this meeting is for the boards to update each other on individual projects that partially or entirely overlap with a project of the other board.

COVID-19: The boards will explain the steps they have taken to respond to the COVID-19, such as implementation and educational guidance and adjustments to their work plans.

Leases other than COVID-19: The IASB staff will explain the recent application questions discussed by the IFRS Interpretations Committee and narrow-scope standard-setting that has been initiated with regard to sale and leaseback transactions. The FASB is monitoring the implementation of its equivalent Standard and in July 2020 added a project to its technical agenda to address issues on which the FASB can act because it already has sufficient information from stakeholders.

Goodwill and Impairment: Both the FASB and the IASB have on their respective agendas projects covering accounting for goodwill. Those projects do not constitute a joint project. However, both boards previously decided to monitor each other’s work because of the largely converged accounting models for business combinations. The FASB’s project is in an active project phase while the IASB’s project is in a research phase.

Supply chain financing: The IASB will describe the issues that have been submitted to the IFRS Interpretations Committee, and the tentative agenda decision it has published. The IASB will also discuss a possible narrow-scope standard-setting project in early 2021. The Big 4 firms submitted an agenda request to the FASB in October 2019 for guidance on disclosure and cash flow statement presentation of supplier finance programmes involving trade payables. Having undertaken research and outreach, the FASB decided in October 2020 to add a project to its agenda to develop disclosure requirements related to supplier finance programmes involving trade payables (a narrow scope).

More information

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

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