The agenda for the meeting is summarised below:

For more information, please see the agenda and meeting papers on the IASB's website.

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.

The EFRAG analysis aims at assessing possible impacts of the new accounting model under consideration for preparers.

Please click for more information on the EFRAG website.

As general background, we welcome the European Commission’s review of the non-financial reporting directive and support companies disclosing high-quality, transparent, relevant and comparable non-financial information that is connected to financial information within mainstream corporate reporting. We support global standards for reporting these because issues such as climate change are global, and the UN Sustainable Development Goals are of course global. However, we recommend a ‘building block approach’ where core global standards can be supplemented by local requirements.

We recognise the urgency of developing harmonised standards for non-financial reporting, and the particular needs of the EU, given that the EU has adopted reporting requirements that will apply in the relatively near term, particularly for financial sector companies. We are encouraged by recent international developments, including the statement of intent of five leading sustainability and integrated reporting organisations to work together in this area and by the IFRS Foundation’s consultation paper on sustainability reporting.

We agree that EFRAG has an essential role to play with respect to non-financial reporting requirements in the EU. What that role would be will depend on the overall approach agreed by the EU Institutions as well as the outcome of current developments in non-financial information standard-setting at the global level. We can see at least two possible roles and approaches for EFRAG:

• an influencer and endorsement adviser with respect to global sustainability standards; or
• standard-setting activities for the EU for non-financial reporting standards.

The expected role of EFRAG in non-financial reporting standard-setting will depend on a proper understanding of what needs to be developed at a European level versus what could be leveraged from global existing and future developments, and related timing. This would have significant implications on the possible changes to EFRAG’s governance and resourcing.

Please click to download our full analysis in the comment letter.

The training materials are aimed primarily at entities currently using a cash basis of accounting and transitioning to, or planning a move to, accrual IPSAS.

The course is structured over ten modules with each broken down into topics including assets, liabilities, financial instruments, and first-time adoption of accrual basis IPSAS.

Please click for more information and access to the materials on the IFAC website.

The Forum will be held in conjunction with the journal Accounting and Finance. The call for papers inviting submissions that can provide evidence to inform the standard-setting activities of the IASB notes the following areas of particular interest:

• Better communication in financial reporting
  • Primary financial statements
  • Management commentary
  • Disclosure initiative – Targeted standards-level review of disclosures
  • Taxonomy
• Research projects
  • Extractive activities
  • Equity accounting
  • Goodwill and impairment
  • Business combinations under common control
• Application
  • Post-implementation reviews of IFRS 9, IFRS 15 and IFRS 16
  • Comprehensive review of the IFRS for SMEs
• Any other topics on the IASB work plan or research pipeline

Please click for more information on the IASB website.

The standards and amendments affected include: 

• IPSAS 41 Financial Instruments;
• IPSAS 42 Social Benefits;
• Long-term Interests in Associates and Joint Ventures (Amendments to IPSAS 36) and Prepayment Features with Negative Compensation (Amendments to IPSAS 41);
• Collective and Individual Services (Amendments to IPSAS 19); and
• Improvement to IPSAS, 2019. 

The amendment can be accessed on the IPSASB website.

On the first day of the meeting, the IASB will discuss the following:

• Work plan
• Maintenance and consistent application
• Disclosure initiative — Subsidiaries that are SMEs
• Management commentary
• Post implementation review of IFRS 10-12

On the second day of the meeting, the IASB and FASB will discuss the following:

• Goodwill and impairment
• Leases other than COVID-19
• COVID-19
• Supply chain financing

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 webinar introduced in more detail the Board’s preliminary views about improving disclosures about acquisitions.

For access to the recordings, please see the press release on the IASB website.

During the introduction of the consultation paper Mr Liikanen noted that when the challenges are global, the most optimal solution would be global. He explained that there have calls for the IFRS Foundation to play a role in this area as the Foundation has a well-established model of global standard-setting, working in close cooperation with both public and private stakeholders.

The presentation was followed by a lively panel discussion on "Climate-related financial disclosures in mainstream entity reporting: Good practices and key challenges", that among other speakers saw participation of representatives of TCFD, CDSB, CDP, and UNEP FI.

Please click for the following additional information:

• Transcript of Mr Liikanen's presentation on the IASB website
• Recording of the entire session (two hours) on the UNCTAD website (please scroll down and choose 5/11/2020, 14:00) - this option also offers Arabic, Chinese, French, Russian, and Spanish translations of the presentations and discussion