The International Accounting Standards Board (Board) has, during its December meeting, voted to propose to amend IFRS 17, the insurance contracts Standard issued in May 2017.
When the Standard was issued, the Board initiated a comprehensive programme of stakeholder engagement to fully understand the practical challenges of implementing IFRS 17 and to identify possible refinements to ease the burden of transition.
This, in turn, led to the Board commencing a process of evaluating the need for making possible amendments to the Standard at its October meeting. In that meeting, the Board decided that any amendments should not:
- result in less useful information for investors;
- disrupt existing implementation processes; and
- risk undue delays in the effective date of a Standard that is much-needed to address inadequacies in the current wide range of insurance accounting practices.
The amendment proposed at this month’s meeting meets those criteria.
The Board’s discussions will continue in early 2019 and will be followed by a public consultation on the proposed amendment(s) before any changes are confirmed. The public consultation will include a one-year deferral of the Standard’s effective date to 2022, which the Board decided to propose during its November meeting.
The papers prepared ahead of the Board’s December meeting discussion about IFRS 17 can be found here.
