SUMMARY OF BOARD DECISIONS

Summary of Board decisions are provided for the information and convenience of constituents who want to follow the Board’s deliberations. All of the conclusions reported are tentative and may be changed at future Board meetings. Decisions are included in an Exposure Draft for formal comment only after a formal written ballot. Decisions in an Exposure Draft may be (and often are) changed in redeliberations based on information provided to the Board in comment letters, at public roundtable discussions, and through other communication channels. Decisions become final only after a formal written ballot to issue an Accounting Standards Update.

June 10, 2010 FASB/IASB Joint Videconference Board Meeting

Insurance contracts. The Boards discussed participating investment contracts and risk adjustment techniques.

Participating Investment Contracts

The Boards discussed whether investment contracts with a discretionary participation feature should be within the scope of a future standard on insurance contracts or within the scope of standards for financial instruments.

The IASB tentatively decided to include investment contracts that both contain a discretionary participating feature and also participate in the same pool of assets as participating insurance contracts within the scope of the future standard on insurance contracts. The Boards asked the staff to consider further the criteria for determining when a pool of assets supports both participating insurance contracts and participating investments contracts, for example, by reference to the proportion of assets relating to insurance contracts in those pools.

Furthermore, the IASB tentatively decided that the boundary of these contracts should be defined as the point at which the contract holder no longer has a contractual right to receive benefits arising from a discretionary participating feature.

The FASB tentatively decided to include these investment contracts in the scope of standards for financial instruments.

Risk Adjustment Techniques

The Boards discussed further which techniques could be used to measure the risk adjustment for insurance contracts (in a measurement approach that includes such an adjustment).

The Boards directed the staff to develop draft guidance that describes techniques for measuring risk adjustments that would satisfy the proposed objective and characteristics of the risk adjustment, such as approaches using confidence intervals, conditional tail expectations, or cost of capital.

Next Steps

The Boards will continue their discussion of this project at their joint meeting on June 14–17.