ASCG comments on IASB ED/2019/6

The ASCG today sent their comment letter on the IASB ED/2019/6 Disclosure of Accounting Policies (Proposed amendments to IAS 1 and IFRS Practice Statement 2) to the IASB.

Overall, we support the IASB’s intention to help entities providing accounting policy disclosures that are more useful to primary users of financial statements and to eliminate immaterial accounting policy disclosures from their financial statements. We agree with the IASB’s objective, since, in practice, accounting policy disclosures often only duplicate the requirements of IFRS Standards and, hence, only contain to a limited extent entity-specific information.

However, we do not believe that the objective will be achieved by replacing the requirement to disclose ‘significant’ accounting policies with a requirement to disclose ‘material’ accounting policies. In our opinion, the guidance provided should point out more clearly the distinction between a) those accounting policy disclosures that are relevant and, thus, shall be provided, and b) those disclosures that shall be omitted.

We welcome that the ED proposes guidance and examples to IFRS Practice Statement 2. However, these examples focus on the identification of accounting policy disclosures that contain only information that duplicates the requirements of IFRS Standards. We suggest the IASB equally provide positive examples illustrating the purpose of the proposed requirements (i.e. entity-specific accounting policy disclosures that provide relevant information to the users of the financial statements).