neoaccounting

By Rachel Grimes Rachel Grimes is the President of the International Federation of Accountants. Ms. Grimes was appointed President in November 2016 after serving as Deputy President since 2014 and IFAC Board member since 2011. She was nominated by CPA Australia and Institute of Chartered Accountants Australia (ICAA), now the Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand. She is also a member of the Nominating Committee. Ms. Grimes is currently Chief Financial Officer, Group Technology Finance at Westpac Group, a multinational financial services firm. Previous to this, Ms. Grimes was Director of Mergers and Acquisitions at Westpac. She has more than 25 years of experience across the financial services sector, working with Westpac and BT Financial Group as well as for PwC. Ms. Grimes joined the ICAA in Australia in 1994 and advanced to Fellowship in 2002, before being appointed as a Director in 2006. Ms. Grimes was appointed President of ICAA in 2011. She also held the offic...

The IFRS ®  Foundation has published a case study report showing how companies from different parts of the world have improved communication in their IFRS financial statements.  Better Communication in Financial Reporting—Making disclosures more meaningful  contains six case studies from varied industries. Its aim is to illustrate how improvements can be made and inspire other companies to initiate their own improvement projects. The report explains the process these companies have gone through to improve disclosures in the notes to their IFRS financial statements and shows examples of the improvements made. By identifying what information is relevant, prioritising it appropriately and presenting it in a clear and simple manner, they have made their financial statements easier for investors to read and understand. Through the use of examples, the report shows that relatively small changes can significantly improve the quality of the financial information that compa...

By Nick Anderson, Member, International Accounting Standards Board Six months ago, the International Accounting Standards Board (Board) issued IFRS 17  Insurance Contracts . This new IFRS Standard replaces the requirements for accounting for insurance contracts in IFRS 4  Insurance Contracts  from 1 January 2021. IFRS 17 introduces fundamental changes to existing insurance accounting practices for some companies. Investors and analysts will need to factor these changes into their analyses. Although many investors and analysts were consulted during the development of the new Standard, it is important that they become familiar with IFRS 17 now that it has been finalised. For that reason, we will continue to invest considerable resources into meeting and educating investors and other users of financial statements. Educating investors and analysts Between May and October 2017, members of the Board and technical staff have met more th...

No! At least not in the immediate future. But like many of the disruptive transformations taking shape around us with everything going digital, external audits cannot stand insulated. Among emerging technological disruptions,  bitcoin  has been presented as a rather contentious alternative to money online. That aside,  blockchain , a critical technology that powers cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is already finding popular application in many industry verticals, including, significantly, financial services as the accepted “trust protocol.” If one scratches the surface, blockchain has its foundations in the distributed ledger concept and cryptology that promises transparency, immutability, security, auditability, highly cost-efficient and is “ever available.” More simply, it is like a copy of a digital ledger automatically maintained and synchronized with every party in a transaction chain that captures every transaction across all the parties as well as any modif...

The American satirist HL Mencken famously quipped that “ For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”  This could have been tailor-made for many finance-focused professions. Ask yourself, how many times have you or your teams applied the “obvious” solution to a problem only to discover, soon enough, that the solution wasn’t quite the “fix all” we hoped for? If your firm hasn’t encountered Root Cause Analysis (RCA) yet, the chances are you will soon. Very soon. RCA is one of a group of classic methodologies known as structured problem solving. In its various iterations it has dominated problem solving in sectors like engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and construction for well over a half a century. Since the turn of the 21 st  century, the method has become increasingly nuanced and versatile. Recently it has been adopted by many of the large international consulting firms as well as several leading tech companies, and many banki...

The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission (COSO) released the final version of its revised enterprise risk management (ERM) Framework,  Enterprise Risk Management–Integrating with Strategy and Performance ,  in September 2017. In the Framework, COSO has come a long way since its initial exposure draft. The Framework takes important steps toward breaking down the siloed nature of managing risk and integrating the responsibly throughout the organization. In  IFAC’s response  to the 2016 exposure draft, we noted that, while the Executive Summary stressed the importance of integration of risk management, the draft Framework itself did not yet sufficiently live up to those aspirations. The final version of the framework now highlights the importance of considering integrating risk in both determining strategy and in driving performance. In this respect it is now closely aligned with the central theme of IFAC’s thought paper  From Bol...

An international accounting standard has finally been released for consultation after 15 years but - in a first - an alternative view has been included.  The International Public Sector Accounting Standards Board released its social benefits accounting standard on 31 October. It has been working on the standard since 2002 but it has taken so long to publish it because board members could not agree on the model. IPSASB as a whole decided to finally publish the standard - which aims to improve consistency, transparency and reporting by governments of social benefit schemes, such as retirement, unemployment and disability - without consensus. The document included an alternative view setting out the reasons the three dissenting board members had for deviating from the opinion of the majority. IPSASB principal Paul Mason told  PF  that an alternative view on a proposed standard is unusual for IPSASB. But because of the complexity and diversity of socia...

Tunisia’s growth is slowly improving, but strong consumption is fuelling inflation and the public sector wage bill is among the world’s highest by proportion of GDP, the International Monetary Fund has warned. It said the country’s exchange rate flexibility, tighter monetary policy and fuel price increases had started to address the imbalances, and the recent launch of a campaign against corruption had improved confidence. Reducing the fiscal deficit was still critically important and would require additional adjustment, including to the cost of public wages. Björn Rother, who led a recent IMF visit, said it would be essential to avoid any further deterioration in the fiscal deficit and “paramount” to contain the public wage bill, which at 14.1% of GDP last year was among the highest in the world. Major adjustments would be needed to bring the wage bill to the target of 12% in 2020. “Far-reaching structural reforms remain front and centre in Tunisia’s quest for inc...