Oliver Gottlieb, Matthias Meitner, and Larissa van Deventer will join the CMAC for a three-year term beginning 1 January 2021, renewable once for an additional three-year term.

Additional information, including information on the backgrounds of the new members, is available on the IASB website.

The amendments replace the 2019 IFRS Taxonomy with the most recent one published by the IFRS Foundation in March 2020 as core taxonomy. The ESEF is amended on a yearly basis to reflect updates to the IFRS Taxonomy published by the IFRS Foundation.

Please click for the following additional information on the ESMA website:

• Press release
• Amendments

Note: A corresponding delegated regulation was published in the Offical Journal of the European Union on 18 December 2020.

By the end of April 2021, several of the EFRAG Board members will have served their maximum term of six years and will rotate off the Board. Other members for which the term expires are eligible for reappointment. European stakeholder organisations and national standard setters in countries that are part of EFRAG’s membership and new organisations that are joining the EFRAG membership are invited to nominate candidates.

Please click for more information on the EFRAG website.

Each day of the event offers a keynote address by a member of the Deloitte Global IFRS Leadership Team (addressing IFRS 9, IFRS 15, and IFRS 16, respectively), which is then followed by a roundtable on industry perspectives or on technical and implementation questions, followed again each day by a Q&A session. Spanning all three days of the event, there is a three-part series on the impact of COVID-19 on financial reporting.

Please click for more information and registration for the event.

During the meeting, the IASB will discuss the following:

• Maintenance and consistent application
• Comprehensive review of the IFRS for SMEs
• Disclosure initiative — Accounting policies
• Primary financial statements
• Post-implementation review of IFRS 9
• Disclosure initiative — Subsidiaries that are SMEs
• Financial instruments with characteristics of equity
• Pension benefits that depend on asset returns

The full agenda for the meeting can be found here. We will post any updates to the agenda, our comprehensive pre-meeting summaries, as well as observer notes from the meeting on this page as they become available.

The committee discussed the feedback on one tentative agenda decision and four new issues:

Agenda decision to finalise

Supply Chain Financing Arrangements—Reverse Factoring: In June 2020, the Committee published a tentative agenda decision which analyses the presentation of liabilities arising from reverse financing arrangement in the statement of financial position, statement of cash flows and the related disclosure. The Committee decided to finalise the agenda decision with some suggested amendments in the wording.

New issues

IAS 1 Presentation of Financial Statements—Classification of debt with covenants as current or non-current: The Committee members generally agree with the analysis how an entity determine whether it has "the right to defer settlement" when a long-term liability is subject to a condition and its compliance with the condition is tested at dates after the reporting date, applying the amended IAS 1, in the three cases described.

IAS 19 Employee Benefits—Attributing benefit to periods of service: The Committee members agreed the conclusion of the periods of service an entity attributes benefit for a defined benefit plan in a scenario where the amount of the retirement benefit an employee is entitled to depends on the length of services before retirement but raised concerns it deviates from the general views in practice.

IAS 38 Intangible Assets—Configuration or customisation of costs in a cloud computing arrangement: The Committee members agreed with the analysis of the accounting for costs of configuring and customising the suppliers' application software to which it receives access in future and the reference to IFRS 15 for the identification and timing of the services provided by the supplier.

IFRS 9 Financial Instruments—Hedging variability in cash flows due to real interest rates: The Committee members agreed with the conclusion that a hedge of the variability in cash flows arising from the changes in real interest rate based on inflation index cannot be accounted for as a cash flow hedge.

For all of the new issues, the Committee members agreed that the principles and requirements in the relevant Standards provide an adequate basis to determine the appropriate accounting for the issue and that the Committee should publish a tentative agenda decision stating that no further action is required.

More In­for­ma­tion

Please click to access the detailed notes taken by Deloitte observers.

The evidence the IASB is looking for includes responses to consultative documents, fieldwork such as assessing systems changes or the hypothetical application of a proposed new financial reporting requirement, empirical analysis from studies of reported accounting data, share price relationships and analysts’ forecasts, the results of experimental studies, analytical modelling, and collecting and analysing views from surveys.

The papers in this round address the following topics (all links to the IASB website):

• Financial Statement Comparability in Extractive Industries: International Evidence
• An Assessment of Corporate Disclosures of IFRS 15: Revenue from Contracts with Customers
• The Impact of Hedging and Hedge Reporting on Managers’ and Investors’ Decisions
• Are Non-GAAP Measures Running Amok? Evidence on the Proliferation of Non-GAAP Adjustments and the Quality of the Related Disclosures
• Income Statement Presentation and Forecasting Quality

In September 2020, the Trustees of the IFRS Foundation published a consultation paper to assess demand for global sustainability standards and, if demand is strong, assess whether and to what extent the Foundation might contribute to the development of such standards. The paper noted the option of creating the SSB. The new board could operate alongside the IASB under the same three-tier governance structure, build on existing developments, and collaborate with other bodies and initiatives in sustainability, focusing initially on climate-related matters.

In his letter, Mr Carney notes:

The IFRS Foundation has an essential role to play in making this vision a reality, and I fully endorse your proposal for a new Sustainability Standards Board under the Foundation’s remit. The Foundation, with its track record of robust, reliable and independent global standard-setting should play a pivotal role in delivering sustainability reporting standards that are in the public interest.

Please click to download the full letter from the IASB website.

Details on the presenters, roundtable participants and speakers are available in the programme on the ANC website.

Three policy papers to be presented at the symposium are available in advance (all links to ANC website):

• Disclosure Transparency and Disagreement Among Economic Agents: The Case of Goodwill Impairment
• The Distinction between Debt and Equity
• Materiality assessment: contribution to single or double materiality debate

Note: A recording of all presentations, speeches, and panel discussions was made available on the ANC website after the event.

In our comments on the proposals in the consultation paper, we also note that the standards to be developed should build on the best of what we have and cite the work of CDP, CDSB, GRI, IIRC and SASB who in September 2020 released a statement of intent to work together towards comprehensive corporate reporting in a comprehensive corporate reporting system. We believe the vision in that statement could serve as a natural starting point for progress towards a more coherent, comprehensive corporate reporting system. For the reasons stated in the consultation paper, we believe that the IFRS Foundation should begin with sustainability reporting standards for climate-related information, however, whilst we believe these standards to be the first priority, we also note that the SSB should proceed without delay to other sustainability topics.

In addition, we point out that the IFRS Foundation’s proposal would lead to a significant step towards a comprehensive corporate reporting system that builds on the well-established efforts of the existing sustainability standards and frameworks to create a standard-setting solution for reporting focused on long-term value creation, connected to financial information. Further blocks can be added to address the wider impacts of companies on the economy, environment and people, and to reflect regional and local public policy priorities. We cite IFAC’s Enhancing Corporate Reporting: The Way Forward as a demonstration of how a ‘building block approach’ can both achieve a core set of global sustainability standards and respond to the local or regional public policy objectives.

Lastly, we stress that timely action is needed to avoid fragmentation, duplications or parallel reporting requirements on topics that are common across the system. In the absence of a single set of global sustainability reporting standards, some regions are moving ahead by themselves. This could result in multiple reporting frameworks and reporting standards existing for an extended (or indefinite) period. The primary objective needs to be a reduction in, and consolidation of, the plethora of different frameworks and standards that currently exist.

We sum up our position by stating:

The scale of the challenges and the increasing momentum from all stakeholders for a global solution for sustainability reporting standards make the undeniable case for immediate action. The actions proposed in the Consultation Paper should be taken without delay.

Download the full comment letter here.