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.
March 7, 2012 FASB Board Meeting
Insurance
contracts. The FASB continued its discussions on the insurance
contracts project by considering the accounting for investment contracts with
discretionary participation features.
The FASB tentatively decided that
investment contracts with discretionary participation features should not be
included within the scope of the insurance contracts standard and therefore
should be accounted for under the financial instruments guidance if the
contracts do not meet the definition of insurance.
Next
Steps
The FASB and the IASB will continue their joint discussions on
insurance contracts in the week of March 19, 2012.
Agenda
decision announcement: definition of a nonpublic entity. The FASB
chairman announced that she added a project to the Board's technical agenda that
will reexamine the definition of a nonpublic entity. The chairman's decision was
based on comments from stakeholders requesting clarification of the existing
definitions and ongoing questions about which definition of a nonpublic entity
was being used in various projects. There also is a similar need for clarity on
the definition of a nonpublic entity with respect to the private company
decision-making framework that the staff has been developing. This project will
provide an opportunity to simplify the definition of a nonpublic entity, address
a few known practice issues, and help to identify the scope of entities that
would be considered in future discussion about potential differences in
requirements for nonpublic entities.