I recently got round to reading E. F. Schumacher’s 1973 book Small is Beautiful: a Study of Economics as if People Mattered, inspired by a post on Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings blog. Popova says: “Sharing an ideological kinship with such influential minds as Tolstoy and Gandhi, Schumacher’s is a masterwork of intelligent counterculture, applying history’s…
As we addressed previously, the IASB has published “a Discussion Paper on possible improvements to the information companies report about acquisitions of businesses to help investors assess how successful those acquisitions have been.” We noted before that the IASB “has concluded that there is no alternative that can target goodwill better and at reasonable cost.” Let’s…
As we addressed here, the IASB issued the exposure draft Covid-19-related rent concessions, with a very short comment period which expired on May 8, 2020. As the IASB noted, the “objective of the amendment is to give timely relief to lessees when applying IFRS 16 to covid-19-related rent concessions while still enabling them to provide…
The IASB has issued Classification of Liabilities as Current or Non-current—Deferral of Effective Date, an exposure draft of a proposed change to IAS 1, with comments requested by June 3, 2020. To recap the underlying subject matter, IAS 1.69 currently sets out four different circumstances in which an entity classifies a liability as current. The…
The time to scrap IFRS accounting has arrived, announces the title of a recent article by Richard Murphy “This is not the moment to critique the multitudinous failings of IFRS accounting,” says Murphy. “It is instead the moment to note that they are the very opposite of the reasonably objective standards for reporting that any…
Someone went on Twitter and posed the plainly unbalanced question: “If Covid could end by sacrificing one IFRS standard, which would you pick and why IFRS-9?” Based on my unscientific review of the responses, IFRS 9 was indeed the favourite to be jettisoned, although IFRS 15 and 17 also got a good sprinkling of votes.…
We previously looked at how the ongoing COVID-19 crisis affects the application of some aspects of IFRS 9, Financial Instruments Here’s another issue. An entity removes a financial liability from its balance sheet when and only when the obligation is extinguished – that is, discharged or cancelled or expires. A substantial modification of the terms…
In this space I’ve sometimes mentioned alternative uses of “IFRS” as an acronym, from the In-Furness Railway Series to Individual Forest Rights. Recent events add a grim new instance to the list – Individual Fatality Rates. Such that Twitter now generates a regular stream of this kind of thing: Lockdown on the hope that a…
I came across an interesting recent commentary by Mark Spencer of BDO, titled We need to think slowly during the coronavirus crisis. Here are some extracts: When I say we need to slow down and think, I mean we should break down the different components of what might happen and understand which first, second and…
The IASB has published “a Discussion Paper on possible improvements to the information companies report about acquisitions of businesses to help investors assess how successful those acquisitions have been.” This was issued on March 19, 2020, at the height of COVID-19 anxiety, and as such you might see it either as a heartening assertion of perseverance,…
There’s been much commentary on how COVID-19 impacts on the application of IFRS 9, Financial Instruments There are various aspects to this, but for today let’s just focus on the application of the impairment model. The general approach, you recall, is to recognize expected credit losses on loans and other financial assets, updating the amount…
Canadian regulators recently responded to current events by issuing the following notice: In light of recent COVID-19 developments and their impact on market participants, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) will provide temporary relief from some regulatory filings required to be made on or before June 1, 2020. The blanket relief will provide a 45-day extension…
