Teaching Advanced IFRS Accounting Topics

The Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants made a significant commitment to provide supplementary materials to assist in the teaching of IFRS to students. Last September the Institute issued some teaching material at the Intermediate level. The CICA has now issued IFRS teaching materials at the advanced level.

These teaching materials are distributed to Canadian Academics but can be downloaded free on the CICA's site. The document was prepared by a team of IFRS experts from National Accounting Firms and Academe.

The 280 page Filling the GAAP to IFRS is an exposition of some advanced IFRS implementation areas with illustrative examples.

This is not intended to replace existing advanced accounting textbooks. It is however, a very serious and thorough exposition of the topics. The document includes the "usual suspects" but a few extras (like "Biological Assets"- not covered under Canadian GAAP). Here are the contents

• Biological Assets
• Asset Impairment
• Provisions, Contingent Liabilities and Contingent Assets
• Joint Ventures
• Income Taxes
• Financial Instruments

Classification and reclassification
Fair Value Measurement issues
Impairments
Debt v Equity Classification
Disclosures
Hedge Accounting (were you afraid to ask)
De recognition (Securitization) of assets and liabilities

• Employee Benefits (includes pensions)
  
• Share Based Payments
• Business Combinations
• Consolidations and separate financial statements
• Foreign Currency Translation
• Earning per Share

When was teaching financial accounting ever this fun? The list does of course also include some topics that have been traditionally covered in upper intermediate level courses - hey just technicalities.

This document is required reading, especially for areas affecting you business. It will be a valuable piece of guidance going forward. There is a disclaimer at the beginning that the guidance is not authoritative in anyway. Nevertheless it reflects a lot of work by a lot of very informed individuals - not to be sneezed at! I will be going over this with a great deal of interest. I find the more I read the more issues come out of the woodwork.

These materials are written from a Canadian perspective and may be misleading from the point of view of other GAAP such as US GAAP, Brazilian GAAP, Indian GAAP or whatever. They could be useful as a guide on areas to be considered but please be careful, as we are careful when looking at IFRS presentations by US Accounting Firms. The SEC considers the development of teaching materials for IFRS an important milestone. Can similar materials for the US be far behind.

Happy New Year, Are you getting ready for IFRS?

Well the IFRS Exorcist is back. I thought that you needed a break from IFRS so I did not post here for two weeks or so. Now I am back and there will be some catching up to do. Rather than posting a big post on everything that has happened I will feed it out to you in smaller bite sizes.

It is important that you have a plan for your IFRS implementation well under way this year. Even though the implementation date for "publicly accountable enterprises" is for years beginning on or after January 1, 2011 you have to have the comparative data in place for the prior year. I have added a count down box on this site to indicate the time to January 1, 2010. You will need to keep dual financial information on Canadian GAAP and IFRS. There may be some retrofitting to do though as you fine tune your research. It will not be optimal to leave you work until 2010 as this will encourage a quick fix - "just the changes ma'm approach". This was a feature of many conversions in the EU and companies have lived to regret this as they have to pick up the pieces later. Who wants to have errors that you have to restate for?

Do not forget that you will have to include information on the progress of your IFRS conversions in your MD&A for your latest year end. See my prior post for information on this. The Securities Commissions will expect to see significant progress on your conversion exercises during 2009.

By the way I spent quite a bit of time on planning over the holiday period. One of my activities involved the development of a new site on hats called Many Hatty Returns (http://www.manyhattyreturns.com). My hat blog is intended to be a bit of a beta for moving this blog to its own site. I have made preparations for this, including reserving a domain name. I will make sure that I iron out issues before transfer. I will be able to deliver a better product on the new site. If you want to look at the general framework you can take a look at my hat site.

Please refer this blog and the hat blog to people who may be interested.

I am hoping for more interactivity in 2009. Please comment and comment often. Please contact me a darla@ifrsexorcist.com with your suggestions.

Adopting IFRSs in Canada: Exposure Draft

Comments are due on the Exposure Draft from the Canadian Accounting Standards Board by the end of tomorrow July 31, 2008.