All articles by Stephen Bouvier – Page 24
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Features
Dial-a-psychic
International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) workplans have tended to be less reliable sources of information than a dial-a-psychic.
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Features
The L’Oréal principle
As if the IASB’s pensions project was not already bizarre enough, the 16 February 2011 meeting set the scene for one of the most bewildering exchanges between a board member and the staff yet.
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Features
Plan the work, work the plan
Another month, another discussion about other comprehensive income. But more than that, the extraordinary meeting of the International Accounting Standards Board on 2 February served to underline a maxim that the London-based standard setter has consistently ignored: plan the work and work the plan.
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Features
Repeating the pensions mistake
Think back to 2006. Armed with a vague plan for its supposedly joint effort with the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) set out to address the measurement challenges presented by so-called contribution-based promises. For its part, we were led to understand that the ...
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Features
Presenting Failures
The IASB’s discussion of pensions accounting in November posed some of the hitherto unanswered questions about the drive to converge IFRS and US GAAP: at precisely what time are accounting standards going to be set?
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Features
Corridor demolished
The corridor is no more. On 20 October, members of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) voted to scrap the IAS19 deferral mechanism. In its place comes the net interest approach.
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NewsDelayed recognition consigned to scrap heap as IASB sticks with net interest
GLOBAL – The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has rejected a staff proposal calling on the board to drop the proposed net-interest approach for the presentation of defined benefit (DB) pension plan components in an entity's statement of comprehensive income (SOCI).
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Features
Risk-analysis wonderland
In its recently published exposure draft on pensions accounting, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) proposed that entities should present a sensitivity analysis to show how changes in key actuarial assumptions might reasonably be expected to affect:
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Features
Reality check
The read across from US GAAP to IFRS is far from easy, despite the efforts of consultants such as Towers Watson and auditors KPMG to break it down. For example, the pensions comparison in the August 2009 edition of KPMG’s ‘IFRS Compared to US GAAP’, runs to 17 pages.
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Features
Better late than never
On 29 April the IASB published its proposals to revamp IAS 19, employee benefits, which “aims to make fundamental improvements to the recognition, presentation and disclosure of defined benefit plans by mid-2011. These improvements will make it easier for users of financial statements to understand how defined benefit (DB) plans affect a company’s financial position, financial performance and cash flows.”
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Features
Open and above board
A chat about catching a plane would seem on the face of it to be a fairly innocuous event. Indeed, amid much fanfare, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il recently jetted into China. Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) Sir David Tweedie’s staff, however, demanded that his trip to Japan be shrouded in more secrecy than the dictator’s.
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News
IASB amendments sensible, say pension consultants
GLOBAL – Proposals for employers to account immediately for all estimated changes in the cost of providing defined benefit (DB) pension schemes have been cautiously welcomed by pension consultants.
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Features
Do as I say, not as I do
Consider this statement by International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) member Patricia McConnell in June 2006: “Is General Motors necessarily bankrupt because it has a huge pension obligation? No, as long as you can look at future obligations and say it will pay down that liability.”
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Special Report
Liabilities & Matching Strategies: More bedtime reading from ASB
Stephen Bouvier looks at the UK ASB’s latest recommendations on pension liability accounting, and how they fit with ongoing IASB efforts
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Features
Presentation revisited
The most controverisal aspect of the IASB’s shake-up of financial statement presentation is the move to a so-called single statement of comprehensive income.
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Features
Presentation matters
The IASB’s joint work on financial statement presentation alongside its US counterpart the FASB, has largely been the stalking horse of the IASB’s efforts to revise IAS19. The FSP project has as its objective the development of an accounting standard that will mandate how entities organise the financial information in their financial statements.
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News
DB disclosure proposals are 'dross' - IASB chairman
[17:00 CET 29-01] GLOBAL - IASB chairman David Tweedie has slammed staff proposals for improving defined benefit disclosure proposals as "dross".
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Features
A handmaid’s tale
The memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the International Accounting Standards Board and its US counterpart, the Financial Accounting Standards Board is key to understanding why European businesses are in danger of drowning in what increasingly resembles a tide of accounting effluent.
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Features
Doing mortality to death
To invest time following the progress of International Accounting Standards Board’s (IASB) pensions project is generally to waste part of an otherwise productive existence.
