I came across a Substack page maintained by The IFRS Accountant…

Do I mean an IFRS Accountant, you ask? Well no, in the sense that the author of the blog (who appears to be British) refers to themselves in the third person as such, otherwise maintaining anonymity other than to tell us: “After 35+ years of working in the accounting industry, The IFRS Accountant shares real-world practical understanding of IFRS accounting standards, how they are applied by companies, reviewed by auditors and understood by investors.” There’s not a lot of IFRS-related blogging going on nowadays, so I thought I’d give this one a friendly mention.

For a taste, a recent post addressed why accountants are worried about the war in Iran:

• For accountants working in companies reporting their Q4 2025 or Q1 2026 reporting, Operation Epic Fury has become Operating Epic Forecast.
• …due to the requirement under IAS1 to include subsequent events in going concern assessments and in impairment reviews under IAS 36 if the year end reporting date is on or after 28 February 2026, accountants will have to urgently reperform their budgets and forecasts to include the impact of the war in Iran in order to meet the requirements under IFRS and satisfy their auditors.
• This is no simple task as the impacts of the war in Iran will affect all business, albeit in different ways. Increases in the price of energy, raw materials, finsihed goods and lower consumer confidence and disposable incomes will be hard to estimate and support.
• Expect more going concern qualifiations and emphasis of matter paragraphs and lots more impairments.

The Accountant had previously anticipated more audit-related scrutiny in this regard:

• Auditors have been repeatedly burnt (audit failure) or criticised (FRC) in recent years due to accepting management’s optimistic future financial projections resulting in delays to booking the inevitable impairment charges.
• As a result, the IFRS Accountant has witnessed auditors become increasingly sceptical of management forecasts over the last few years as well as on WACCs and terminal growth rates. Just because they accepted these assumptions last year, do not expect them to accept them this year as the world has changed and auditors are now very risk averse when it comes to impairment and will often be a critical accounting judgement and a critical accounting estimate at the same time.

That’s only one example of how the Accountant stays plugged into current issues. Here’s another:

• AI data centres, which everyone is talking about these days, are specifically built for raw processing power using the latest expensive AI chips (e.g. Nvidia) and similarly fast other components (e.g. memory, hard drives etc, high-speed interconnects…) to run the computationally intensive tasks of training and running artificial intelligence and machine learning models. As a result, these AI data centres typically require liquid-cooling systems and typically use 5 to 10 times more power.
• Given that these systems are built for raw speed, the rapid development of AI chips potentially means that the most important and expensive components of these systems may be upgraded at a much faster rate than in traditional data centres. However, the AI chips are only a part of a much bigger and expensive data centre infrastructure including power generation, memory and data storage, cooling and other facilities, which needs to be taken into account when determining the useful lives of the facility.
• Under IAS 16.43, “Each part of an item of property, plant and equipment with a cost that is significant in relation to the total cost of the item shall be depreciated separately.” As a result, we would expect different parts of AI data centres to be depreciated separately, especially given the significant cost of the key AI chips, although it is very unclear whether this is happening.
• If they are not being depreciated at a faster rate than the rest of the data centre infrastructure, then these is a significant impairment risk inherent in these facilities if AI chip development continues to accelerate (and the existing chips become obsolete) or if the growth in AI product revenues being sold on the back of these AI data centres fails to materialise.

Finally, a little glimpse into the Accountant’s formative experiences:

• The IFRS Accountant never wanted to be an auditor for their career and whilst they did enjoy the job for a number of years after qualifying, this was only to get sufficient experience for a move into industry…
• Whilst the IFRS Accountant has the greatest respect for IFRS specialists working in the audit firms, they can tend to be disconnected from the realities of business in that IFRS Accounting Standards cannot always provide the answer as to how to account for a transaction that was never envisioned when the standard was written…
• … to become a Chartered Accountant you will have to survive 3 years of being an auditor, working insane hours with people who will happily stab you in the back if it means getting a job on the auditor merry-go-round at the end or you intend to leave and go into industry at that point.

Well, we can be glad the IFRS Accountant survived and flourished!

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.