From Australia comes another contribution to the seemingly endless debate about disclosure overload This is an Australian Accounting Standards Board staff paper titled “To Disclose or Not to Disclose: Materiality is the Question” (a Google search confirms my feeling that this Hamlet-derived formulation has been used far too often to be effective now, including in…
Is XBRL the future of financial reporting asks Tom Selling in the title of a recent post on his Accounting Onion website, immediately answering his own question with an exuberant “YES!” Here’s part of his argument: “..the FASB should take it as a given that XBRL will be a game changer for accounting standards. For…
“IFRS could be stripped of accountancy watchdog role”, says the title of a recent article in the UK Telegraph newspaper. According to the writer, Louise Armitstead, the IFRS Foundation “has been severely criticized by MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) for poor governance structures, a lack of transparency and its ‘close links to the accounting…
Although financial reporting has brought a miraculous amount of clarity and structure to the world, it’s also responsible for a colossal volume of wasted time…. A recent manifestation of this is IFRIC Interpretation 21 Levies, effective for annual periods beginning on or after January 1, 2014. IFRIC 21 was driven by requests for guidance on…
The IASB has issued IFRS 14 Regulatory Deferral Accounts, effective for annual periods beginning on or after January 1, 2016. For those who aren’t familiar with the area, IFRS 14 brings into IFRS for the first time a practice long-established elsewhere, that entities subject to rate-regulation (power suppliers and suchlike) can justify recognizing assets and…
Issues arising in determining whether to recognize revenue on a gross or net basis Here’s an extract from the Alberta Securities Commission’s recent Corporate Finance Disclosure Report, issued in December 2013: “IAS 18, paragraph 8 states that revenue includes only the gross inflows of economic benefits received and receivable by the entity on its own…
The IASB’s recent Annual Improvements includes some important changes to IFRS 2 For my money, IFRS 2 Share-based payment is one of the more poorly expressed standards, in that it does a weak job of laying out its core principles, and all but encourages a reader to get lost in definitions and complexities, without really…
The IASB has released its latest exposure draft of annual improvements to IFRSs, with comments to be received by March 13, 2014 To obtain this post, and additional articles on IFRS by other writers, go to http://ifrs.wileyvws.com/ifrs-news-and-resources/ (free sign-up required)
Observations on a recent address by IASB Chair Hans Hoogervorst I’m sure Hans Hoogervorst is a capable Chair of the IASB in most respects, but his speeches – at least as published on the website – are consistently awful. A recent example delivered in Tokyo, titled “Defining Profit or Loss and OCI… can it be…
The IASB sheds more light on a key aspect of IFRS 8 Converting to IFRS didn’t create too many difficulties for most Canadian companies in the area of segment reporting, because the main points of IFRS 8 are much the same as those in old Canadian GAAP standard CICA 1701: they both build on the…
John Hughes IFRS Blog 