Let’s return to our coverage of Pope Leo I’m joking – no disrespect, but the Holy Father and his predecessors haven’t typically been within this blog’s zone of interest. But the recent encyclical letter on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence touches on a few areas we’ve covered in the past.…
The IFRS Foundation recently issued an update on the appointment of its new chair: But if it’s going so well, you might ask, why the gap in transition? My understanding, based on information received from my mole in the organization, is that the chosen successor was initially reluctant to assume the post, and that it…
The Canadian Accounting Hall of Fame has announced its latest group of inductees. There are only four, by far the smallest number to date (last year there were six; there were eight in the year before that). In the “founders of the profession” category, there’s Kenneth Le Mesurier Carter, summarized as follows: He died in…
As we covered here, IFRIC recently discussed a fact pattern relating to reassessing control. In the fact pattern, the governing document of an investee controlled by an entity is amended in a way that could result in a change in the investee’s relevant activities, as well as in the rights of the entity and other…
As we’ve covered in the past, one of the major aspects of the new standard IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements, applicable for periods beginning on or after January 1, 2027, is its approach to disclosing “management-defined performance measures.” IFRS 18 describes such a measure as a subtotal of income and expenses (excluding…
ISSB Chair Emmanuel Faber continues to tinker with messaging… This is from a recent speech at the 2026 Beijing International Sustainability conference: As we covered here, Faber himself has cited ESG in the past in setting out the importance of the ISSB’s work, so to say the standards have never been about that involves some…
The US Securities and Exchange Commission has proposed rule and form amendments that would give public companies the option of filing semiannual reports in lieu of quarterly reports to meet their interim reporting obligations under the federal securities laws. Here’s the news release summary: “Regulatory flexibility” is one of those terms (like “public interest”) that…
Louis Goss recently published an article titled The end of the accountancy gravy train. Here are some extracts: The article cites, among other things, the increased difficulty in becoming a salaried partner, increasing centralization that leaves many partners feeling like corporate employees (“the camaraderie of the old days has gone”), shortened partnership timelines shifting the…
In a post titled Skate to Where the Puck is Going, Armand Capisciolto, Chair of Canada’s Accounting Standards Board, recently set out some questions arising from ongoing changes in technology, relating to the Board’s ongoing research into how those changes are affecting the way financial information is consumed and accounting standards are applied: Areas he…
The ISSB recently announced a decision to propose requirements for nature-related disclosures in the form of an IFRS Practice Statement. This is from the news release: The ISSB had been discussing this project under the label “biodiversity, ecosystems and ecosystem services,” deciding only recently to change the title to “nature-related disclosures.” Nature-related risks and opportunities…
It feels recently as if I could devote this blog entirely to AI-related developments… …as if every new entry might anxiously immerse itself in the tussle of risk and opportunity, hopelessly trying to parse the significance of the latest piece of AI-related news or commentary (and there’s never a day without something new to chew…
The IASB recently discussed how to respond to stakeholder feedback on the Request for Information Post-implementation Review of IFRS 16 Leases. The staff paper indicates that many stakeholders commented on the ongoing costs for lessees of applying the IFRS 16 measurement requirenents. Among other feedback, they find “many aspects of the Standard very complex to apply and…
SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce recently delivered a speech titled The Art and Science of Materiality. She illustrated the broad concept in the following remarkable fashion: The point of this remarkable soliloquy is that “regulators should not substitute their judgment for companies making materiality judgments in good faith (and) cannot short-circuit that company-specific judgment with one-size-fits-all…
The Ontario Securities Commission recently filed an Application for Enforcement Proceeding against KPMG LLP, for audit failures relating to KPMG’s 2019 and 2020 audits of four funds managed by Bridging Finance Inc. As the news release summarizes things: The application groups the allegations into four categories: It’s perhaps bleakly ironic that there was no requirement…
The IFRS Foundation recently published its 2025 Annual Report, bearing the title “Fit for the Future.” The financial highlights, as summarized in the news release: As always, it’s tempting to think that the IFRS Foundation’s annual report might be as close as humanly possible to a state-of-the-art document, and to read it from a correspondingly…
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