November 2020

The IFRS Foundation Trustees recently announced the appointment of Andreas Barckow to serve as Chair of the Board, effective July 2021. He will succeed Hans Hoogervorst, who completes his second five-year term in June 2021.

The Trustees also confirmed the appointment and re-appointment of several organisations and individuals to the IFRS Advisory Council, effective 1 January 2021.

The Board has launched a public consultation on possible new accounting requirements for mergers and acquisitions involving companies within the same group—business combinations under common control. The consultation paper presents the Board's preliminary views with the aim to reduce diversity in practice and to improve transparency and comparability in reporting these transactions.

The Board has also proposed to amend IFRS 16 Leases by specifying how a company measures the lease liability in a sale and leaseback transaction. The proposed amendment would improve the sale and leaseback requirements already in IFRS 16 by providing greater clarity for the company selling and leasing back an asset both at the date of transaction and subsequently.

The Board has started its Post-implementation Review (PiR) of the classification and measurement requirements in IFRS 9 Financial Instruments and has added the PIR as a project to its work plan.

Seventy academics and practitioners, including standard-setters and regulators, came together for the virtual IASB Research Forum 2020 to discuss the latest research into financial reporting matters. Access the recordings and slides or find out more about the call for papers for the 2021 edition of this event.

In the November 2020 episode of our monthly IASB podcast, Hans Hoogervorst and Sue Lloyd, Chair and Vice-Chair of the Board, talk about the IASB's annual joint education session with the US standard-setter FASB, current Post-implementation Review projects, Management Commentary and Subsidiaries that are SMEs. Find out more detail in the full IASB Update for November. Also, catch up on the October episode, featuring Sue Lloyd and Technical Director Nili Shah talking about the Board's upcoming Agenda Consultation.

The IFRS Foundation has published educational material to highlight how existing requirements in IFRS Standards require companies to consider climate-related matters when their effect is material to the financial statements.

Chair of the IFRS Foundation Trustees Erkki Liikanen delivered the keynote speech at the UNCTAD Intergovernmental Working Group of Experts on International Standards of Accounting and Reporting, introducing the Trustees' Consultation Paper on Sustainability Reporting. Meanwhile, three other Trustees hosted live webinars and moderated Q&A sessions on the same topic—view the recordings here.

The IFRS Taxonomy 2020—Proposed Update 5 General Improvements and Common Practice—IAS 19 Employee Benefits proposes changes that aim to support the high-quality tagging of information disclosed about employee benefits.