Financial statement presentation — Comprehensive project

Background

This project addresses broadly the issues related to the display and presentation in the financial statements of all recognised changes in assets and liabilities from transactions or other events except those related to transactions with owners as owners (sometimes called comprehensive income). Thus, it will consider items that presently are reported in the income statement, cash flow statement, and statement of changes in equity.

The IASB worked on this project on its own from 2001 to 2004. The title of the project during that period was 'Performance Reporting' and, later, 'Reporting Comprehensive Income'. The US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) was also working on a similar project. In April 2004 the boards agreed that, in the interests of convergence, a project on this topic should be conducted jointly. They will regard the past work of each organisation as a useful resource, but will not feel bound by it. In November 2004, the IASB and FASB jointly appointed a new Joint International Group on Performance Reporting to assist the boards in their joint project to establish standards for presenting, in the financial statements, information that is useful in assessing the financial performance of a business enterprise.

So, in a sense, the project had a 'fresh start' in November 2004. The new project is called Financial Statement Presentation. This web page contains information about the joint IASB-FASB project that started in November 2004. For historical purposes, we have retained, on a separate project page, the information about the old 'Performance Reporting (Reporting Comprehensive Income) Project' from 2001 to 2004.

 

Current status of the project

On June 24 2010, the IASB and FASB effectively discontinued this project, deciding to engage in additional outreach activities before finishing and publishing an exposure draft.  To this end, a staff draft of a proposed standard was published on 1 July 2010 to seek informal comment on the decisions reached to date in the project.

The IASB has indicated it will investigate whether the work previously done on the financial statement presentation project could form the basis of its new research project to develop a disclosure framework.  This revised project on financial statement presentation could be developed in parallel with the IASB's comprehensive project on the conceptual framework.

 

Project milestones

DateDevelopmentComments
July 2001 Added to the agenda
November 2004 Joint International Group on Performance Reporting appointed Inaugural members listed in our news article
16 October 2008 Discussion Paper Preliminary Views on Financial Statement Presentation issued Comment deadline 14 April 2009
1 July 2010 Staff Draft of Exposure Draft IFRS X Financial Statement Presentation published Formal comment not sought, but input welcome

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