FRC: New project focusing on accounting policy disclosures and integration of related financial information

08 May 2013

The FRC's Financial Reporting Lab (the Lab) is calling for listed companies and investors/analysts to participate in a project on approaches to disclosing accounting policy information that are considered to be most effective.

This project will also explore the ordering of footnotes to the financial statements, as this is a topic that arises when companies integrate accounting policy disclosure with detailed footnote disclosure. FRC also plans to consider linking or integrating related information on policies and their application, the resulting financial statement information, and the financial review.

The aim of the Lab’s project is to provide insight from the corporate and investment communities on effective approaches to reporting, including both the content and style of presenting information. The project will provide companies with an opportunity to better understand what it is that the investment community believes is most helpful, both within and beyond current requirements.

It is anticipated that the following aspects can be considered:

Accounting policy disclosure

• Opportunities to omit disclosure of policy information that is not significant for the company (i.e. making materiality judgements not to disclose certain information).
• Boilerplate text, including whether disclosure that repeats the text of the related IFRS requirement should be cut as clutter or enhanced to provide context that relates the policy to the company’s business, its transactions, and the resulting amounts in the financial statements.
• Disclosure of accounting policies:
  • policies that are required by IFRS -- those for which there is no policy choice;
  • policy choices, and changes in policy or the significance of items subject to the policy;
  • key judgements, assumptions and estimates made in applying policies;
  • new IFRS requirements adopted, and new requirements not yet adopted.
• Presentation of accounting policy disclosure:
  • within a single note, or integrated within the respective topical footnotes;
  • identifying more (or less) significant policies;
  • the desirability of policy information being reported outside of the financial statements on the company’s website, or within a separate section of the financial statements. Issues related to the audit of information shown outside of the financial statements is also expected to be considered.

Footnote order

• Integrating separate notes on the same topic (combining notes on tax expense and tax assets/liabilities, for example) and different approaches to ordering the notes and their content.

Financial review

• Placement of information, including integration of financial statement information and the financial review.

Companies are requested to indicate interest in participating in this project over the course of the next month.

Press release

© FRC