IASB, FASB say convergence impaired by impairment impasse; Carney says finish by the end of 2013.
The long slog of convergence needs to end by the end of the year. That’s the edict from Financial Stability Chairman and future Bank of England chief Mark Carney, who in in his letter to the G20 said the delay in convergence was concerning.
As for the International Accounting Standards Board and counterpart US Financial Accounting Standards Board, the two regulators issued a joint progress report to the G20 noting the impairment problem but also highlighting where the two were in synch.
“During 2012, the boards worked together to eliminate differences in their respective classification and measurement models,” the two accounting watchdogs said in a statement, noting “convergence decisions” in the following areas:
- Contractual Cash Flow Characteristics Assessment.
- Business Model Assessment.
- Fair value through other comprehensive income.
- Fair value through profit or loss would be the residual measurement category that would include all assets that ‘fail’ the assessment of the contractual cash flow characteristics.
But it was impairment that remains the sticking point. “This is probably the most important phase of our project to overhaul the accounting for financial instruments,” the boards said. “While the boards worked jointly to develop an ‘expected loss’ approach to impairment, US stakeholders raised numerous concerns about early drafts of the so-called ‘three-bucket’ approach,” the IASB and FASB said.
The three-bucket, as Ernst & Young has simply put it, proposes that “financial assets (e.g., loans, debt securities) would migrate from Bucket 1 to Bucket 2 or 3 if evidence supports deterioration in credit quality to a certain level from initial recognition.” (See illustration below).
However, after initially supporting the approach, FASB rejected it because the use of two different measurement objectives created ambiguity and was also hard to implement. This was part of the broader problems FASB head Leslie Seidman pointed out as an obstacle to convergence. “The bottom line is that our stakeholders will demand clarity,” she said at a December conference. Also, according to many observers, stakeholders felt the criteria for determining which measurement objective would apply was basically the same delayed recognition of credit loss that the new approaches were proposing to mitigate.
In late December 2012 the FASB published its Exposure Draft and comment period ends April 30, 2013. After the board reviews the feedback, it will issue a recommendation. As a result of the pushback, the IASB agreed to revise the approach to “address concerns that had been raised about the point at which full lifetime expected losses should be recognized. The revised model will result in an initial recognition of a portion of the lifetime expected losses, with full lifetime expected losses being recognized only once a financial asset significantly deteriorates (ie to the point that an economic loss is suffered beyond the level that was originally anticipated and priced into the financial asset).”
In the meantime, the FSB’s Mark Carney wants it all wrapped up by the end of the year. “We note with concern the delays in convergence to date,” Mr. Carney said in his letter to the G20. “We therefore recommend that the G20 ask the IASB and FASB to prepare by end-2013 a roadmap for converging to a common approach for impairment and for achieving the G20 objective of a single set of high quality accounting standards.”
What wasn’t addressed in either of the letters was any mention of the Securities and Exchange Commission feelings on implementing International Financial Reporting Standards. It favors a phase-in approach or “condorsement,” which it proposed in 2011 and which has the support of a number of SEC staff as well as the business community. The idea was that the US would adopt the standards over a 5- to 7-year period. However, the IASB does not like the phased-in idea, calling it costly and impractical.
Source: IASB/FASB 2012