IFRS - 2008: Wasn’t that supposed to be a quiet year?

21 January 2009

2008: Wasn’t that supposed to be a quiet year?

As
we enter 2009, this seems a good opportunity to reflect on the year
that has just ended. I could talk, for example, about the economic
climate or, on a happier note, the Beijing Olympics. But this is an
IFRS blog so I ought to focus on financial reporting matters.

2008
was supposed to be a reasonably quiet year. The IASB stated in 2006
that it would not make any major new standards effective before 2009.
And with the exception of IFRS 7, ‘Financial instruments: Disclosures’,
being effective from 2007, on the whole there have been few new
requirements for companies to deal with.

So
at the beginning of 2008, companies with a calendar year end were not
expecting to implement any new or amended standards. Unless the new
IFRIC interpretations effective that year (IFRIC 11, ‘IFRS 2 – Group
and treasury share transactions’, IFRIC 12, ‘Service concession
arrangements’, and IFRIC 14, ‘IAS 19 – The limit on a defined benefit
asset, minimum funding requirements and their interaction’) were
relevant, we might have expected the 2008 annual report to look a lot
like its 2007 equivalent. Some may have been looking forward to a
trouble-free year end.

Since
around the third quarter of the year, financial reporting matters have
been hitting the headlines on almost a weekly basis. Fair value
measurement, classification and reclassification of financial assets,
impairments and going concern disclosures have been exercising not just
the accountants; accounting has been thrust into the political
limelight, for example, becoming a key area of focus at the G20 heads
of government meeting in November.

Meanwhile, the IASB has continued its standards improvement programme, with an ambitious target for 2011 delivery. This is...

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