On the radar
Chair of the IASB Board discusses first impressions and agenda consultation
In his inaugural speech in September 2021, Andreas Barckow, Chair of the IASB Board, discussed the IASB Board’s agenda in the coming years and shared his thoughts on how the IASB Board could collaborate more closely with national standard setters.
Every five years, the IASB Board solicits feedback from stakeholders on where resources should be focused. The third agenda consultation has closed, and while feedback has not been fully analyzed, the Chair recognized the following areas that receive consistent feedback from stakeholders.
- Consultations and changes: a focus on staggering publication dates to allow stakeholders time to respond.
- Collaboration with its now-formed sister board, the International Sustainability Standards Board, dealing with sustainability disclosures (see below).
- Intangible assets: a need to have a fresh look at IAS 3811, which is more than 20 years old and has never been revisited other than for consequential changes resulting from other projects.
International Sustainability Standards Board announced
On November 3, 2021, the Trustees of the IFRS Foundation announced the creation of a new sister body to the IASB Board – the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB Board) – with the aim of putting sustainability reporting on the same footing as financial reporting. The goal is to drive globally consistent, comparable and reliable sustainability reporting using a building blocks approach. This approach will allow national and regional jurisdictions to build on that global baseline to set supplemental standards that serve their specific jurisdictional needs.
SEC Chair Gary Gensler has clearly indicated that the SEC’s proposals will be focused on the needs of US markets. However, this does not necessarily signal a lack of support for the work of the ISSB Board. In particular, consideration of the work of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures is clearly in the thinking of both the SEC and the IFRS Foundation, which could mean that climate-related disclosures converge over time with a global baseline emerging.
Read more about the ISSB Board and its consolidation with other leading organizations, and what this means for US companies awaiting the SEC proposals, in KPMG article, International Sustainability Standards Board announced.