The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) recently concluded its Post-implementation Review of the impairment requirements in IFRS 9 Financial Instruments—Impairment and published a Project Summary and Feedback Statement. Here’s the summary of conclusions: the costs of applying the impairment requirements and auditing and enforcing their application are not significantly greater than expected. They note along the…

As we discussed here, in March 2024 the IASB published for comment the Exposure Draft Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment. In the exposure draft, the IASB (among other things) addressed some reasons for concerns that impairment losses on goodwill are sometimes being recognized too late, including: the design of the impairment test can shield goodwill from…

The New York Times recently published a piece titled Dilemma on Wall Street: Short-Term Gain or Climate Benefit? It’s written by Lydia DePillis. Here are some extracts: A team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average…

As we discussed here, in March 2024 the IASB published for comment the Exposure Draft Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment. As we previously covered, the exposure draft rejected some of the more ambitious ideas mooted in the past, such as reintroducing amortization of goodwill, focusing instead on fine-tuning the methodology for impairment testing and introducing additional…

As a special warm weather treat, it’s time now for another in our long-running series of extracts from real-life tweets (as they used to be called – I suppose I should now say “posts on X,” or some comparable absurdity) that made some mention of IFRS, presented here in their original form, all oddity and…

You’ll recall that following amendments to IAS 1 in 2022, an entity classifies a liability as current when, among other things, it does not have the right at the end of the reporting period to defer settlement of the liability for at least twelve months after the reporting period. The standard specifies that if the right to defer…

Canada’s Globe and Mail recently published, on the same day, a couple of interestingly contrasting opinion pieces. The first, titled Small companies risk buckling under the burdens of mandatory sustainability reporting, was by Andrew McLaughlin. Here are some extracts: I’m a senior executive at a small company (under $1-billion market cap) that’s just gone through…

The Canadian Accounting Hall of Fame announces its 2024 inductees! There are eight of them, six of whom are still with us. This is perhaps the most distinctive of the eight summarized bios: Harold Calla’s education and professional experience was the basis for decades-long work to educate and support First Nations build effective governance capacity…

With his “Let’s Stay Connected” address to the European Accounting Association Annual Congress, Andreas Barckow delivers one of the all-time most interesting speeches by an IASB Chair. Rather like identifying the world’s largest gnat, you say? Not at all! I’ll devote the entire space today to some extracts: … today, ‘connectivity’ seems to be everything:…

Let’s take another look at the report published by the University of Sheffield’s Audit Reform Lab, titled Reward for failure: The paradox of audit partners’ record payouts amidst poor audit quality. These are some of its recommendations: We recommend legal separation of audit and non-audit services as the start point for any future reform. The…