2023

In partnership with the European Accounting Association and its journals Accounting in Europe and European Accounting Review, the Forum hosted 85 participants at the IESEG Management School in Paris 2–4 November.

The IASB Research Forum gives academics, practitioners and standard-setters a platform for discussing academic papers with relevance to standard-setting.

Academics’ work is vital to informing the IASB’s current projects, and its research pipeline.

The IASB plans to start a project to comprehensively review the accounting requirements for intangible assets. Initial research will seek to identify the scope of the project and how best to stage work on this topic to deliver timely improvements to IFRS Accounting Standards. This was decided following an Agenda Consultation, which determined the IASB’s priorities until 2026.

This year, the papers focused on:

• accounting for software costs;
• goodwill;
• carbon credit accounting;
• companies’ and investors’ views on intangible assets;
• economic consequences of purchase price allocation; and
• tax versus capital market incentives in choosing accounting standards.

Breakout sessions were also held to discuss recognition and measurement of intangible assets, reporting information on future-oriented expenses and disclosures of intangible items, focusing on EFRAG’s recommendations and feedback statement about its discussion paper, Better Information on Intangibles: Which is the best way to go?

Katherine Schipper, a professor at Duke University, moderated a discussion between IASB members Florian Esterer, Bertrand Perrin and Robert Uhl, and Anne Wyatt, a professor at Deakin University.

This panel discussed questions about standard-setting on intangible assets, including on:

• the usefulness of guidance in IFRS Accounting Standards as a starting point for a research project on accounting for intangibles;
• diversity in practice in the absence of authoritative guidance;
• comparability;
• the scope of current standards; and
• the intent and type of evidence most useful to the IASB.

Audio recordings and presentations from the research paper sessions are now available.