Issue 86 - IFRS News in Brief

PUBLICATIONS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

• The Annotated Issued IFRS® Standards 2018 replaces the book previously known as A Guide through IFRS Standards and is now available at: https://shop.ifrs.org/ProductCatalog/Product.aspx?ID=2018&utm_source=NewsArticle&utm_medium=ifrs.org&utm_campaign=AnnotatedIssued2018 
• The Board issued narrow-scope amendments to IFRS 3 Business Combinations to improve the definition of a business.
  For more details, see the IASB press release here: https://www.ifrs.org/news-and-events/2018/10/iasb-amends-definition-of-business-in-ifrs-standard-on-business-combinations/
• IASB has issued amendments to its definition of material (Amendment to IAS1 and IAS 8) to make it easier for companies to make materiality judgements. For more details, see the IASB press release here: https://www.ifrs.org/news-and-events/2018/10/iasb-clarifies-its-definition-of-material/

INTERNATIONAL ACCOUNTING STANDARDS BOARD (IASB) LATEST DECISIONS SUMMARY

The following is a summarised update of the main discussions and tentative decisions taken by the IASB at its meeting on 24-25 October.  

For more details and comprehensive information on the IASB’s discussion see: https://www.ifrs.org/news-and-events/updates/iasb-updates/october-2018/

IFRS Interpretations Committee

The Board received an update on the September 2018 meeting of the IFRS Interpretations Committee. The Board agreed with the recommendation to propose a narrow-scope amendment to IAS 12 Income Taxes.

IFRS 17 Insurance Contracts

The Board received an update on work to support implementation of IFRS 17 and decided that when proposing any amendments to IFRS 17, staff must demonstrate the following criteria. The Board tentatively decided that the following criteria must be met in order for an amendment to be proposed:

• The amendments would not result in significant loss of useful information relative to that which would otherwise be provided by IFRS 17. Any amendments would avoid:
  
  • Reducing the relevance and faithful representation of information;
  • Causing reduced comparability, introducing internal inconsistency or unduly disrupting implementation already under way; and
  • Increasing complexity and reducing understandability.

The Board will continue the discussion whether any concerns and implementation challenges a need for standard-setting to amend the requirement of IFRS 17 in a future meeting.

Primary Financial Statements

The Board discussed the labels that describe the subtotals on the financial statement(s).  The Board tentatively decided the following:

The Board also discussed that the label ‘earnings before interest and taxes’ (EBIT) would not be a faithful representation of the subtotal referred to in ‘profit or loss before financing and income tax’ and management performance measure labelled EBIT should faithfully represent that measure.

Disclosure Initiative

The Board tentatively decided

• to clarify that not all accounting policies relating to material transactions, other events or conditions are material.
• to continue developing guidance and examples to help entities decide whether the accounting policies they apply are themselves material.

Preface to IFRS Standards

The Board tentatively decided to remove some information from the Preface as it is more appropriately covered by the Constitution or Due Process Handbook of the IFRS Foundation, as well as by IFRS.

Goodwill and impairment

The Board tentatively decided that the staff should not perform a complete review of all the disclosure requirements in IFRS 3 Business Combinations and IAS 36 Impairment of Assets.

In addition to the topics above, the Board received an update on the following matters; however, the Board was not asked to make any decision, and will discuss in a future meeting:

• Rate-regulated activities
• Management commentary

UPCOMING COMMENT DEADLINES