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Mark Squire: Okay. I think we’ll get started now, and if we have some people join later, that’s okay.
Good morning, everyone, and welcome to today’s Domestic Accounting Standards update webinar. Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning.
There will be a quiz at the end of this webinar. Attendance and successful completion of the quiz may count toward your CPD requirements, so check with your provincial or territorial institute to see what qualifies for CPD. The link for the quiz will be included at the end, and if you complete the quiz successfully, you’ll be emailed the certificate for your records.
Just a reminder that the opinions stated today in this webinar reflect those of the presenters and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AcSB. I will mention that throughout the presentation we’ll be using the terms Accounting Standards Board, AcSB as an acronym, and the board interchangeably. So just so there’s no confusion, all of those things mean the same thing.
On behalf of the Accounting Standards Board, it’s now my pleasure to introduce today’s speaker, Armand Capisciolto. Armand is the chair of the Accounting Standards Board. He served on the board since 2015, including as a member, vice-chair, and now the chair. His extensive experience as a standard-setter also includes chairing the AcSB’s Private Enterprise Advisory Committee and membership on the IFRS Accounting Standards Discussion Group.
My name is Mark Squire. I’m a principal with the Accounting Standards Board. I’m part of the staff that supports the work of the AcSB to develop high-quality accounting standards and other guidance for private enterprises and not-for-profit organizations.
Next, I’ll go through our… Sorry. There we go. Next, I’ll go through our agenda for today. This session is going to cover the AcSB strategic and annual plans recently issued and recently amended domestic accounting standards, the AcSB’s Guidance Framework, and the AcSB’s current work plan for domestic standards. We’ll also tell you about some upcoming documents for comments and ways that you can get involved and share your views and feedback with the AcSB on current projects. If you have any questions throughout the webinar, you can add those in the question box through Zoom, and we’ll try and answer those either as we go along if they’re functional questions or we’ll get to some questions at the end of the session.
But we’ll start with a polling question asking: What is your current role? This is going to help us understand who our audience is and— I have to find my poll button [chuckles] and open this poll.
Okay. So that should be up. So, tell us what you do, and that’ll help us tailor our presentation to what our audience is. I see people are already answering that. Thank you.
It looks like most people have answered. So it looks like we’ve got a pretty good mix here, lots of practitioners and advisors and financial statement preparers. We’ve also got some users in academics in the group. So what a great audience we’ve got today!
Okay. So with that, I’ll pass it over to Armand to tell you about the AcSB strategic plans. And with that—
Armand Capisciolto: Okay. Thanks, Mark. And very excited to see some financial statement users on the line. Always, always love when we have users listening in.
So, maybe we’ll start with kind of how what we do for strategic planning at the board we set. We do a strategic plan every five years. That plan really drives the work we do. So, every year we do an annual plan, and it’s driven by our strategic plan. And given the importance of that strategic plan on driving the activities of the board, it’s important that we hear from our interested and affected parties entering our strategic planning process, which really brings me to the next slide. And probably the more important aspect is not our past plan but what we’re working on towards our future plan.
Our current strategic plan ends March 31, 2027. For those of you that follow us diligently, you all know that we issued our draft 2027–2032 Strategic Plan for comment last Thursday. It’s available for you to comment on. That comment period, I believe, is open till September 9.
In addition to giving you an opportunity to comment on the document itself, we’ll be holding various outreach events, and we really hope to see a lot of you out at those outreach events to give us your thoughts on our proposed strategic plan. And when I think about our proposed strategic plan and the environment that we were developing this draft plan—and so if we go to the next slide, Mark—it’s a really interesting time to be doing strategic planning.
It’s a pretty uncertain time that we’re living in right now. There’s lots of uncertainty, whether they’re geopolitical or otherwise. You have rapid technological change. You have what people read to make resource allocation decisions inside and outside. The financial statement is evolving. And, really, how entities are accessing capital and resources is changing.
And all of that is kind of in an environment where, I don’t care who you’re talking about, there’s resource constraints. We have constraints at the board; you have constraints at your organization. Everybody’s dealing with resource constraints. So when we did, we undertook our strategic planning, we kept all of this in mind. And so when you all read our strategic plan, which again is available on the website, you will see our strategic plan. We are proposing four pillars.
So Mark, if you go to the next slide— so we have four pillars that are built upon a foundation of due process and communication. But those four pillars that we’re working on are to foster meaningful engagement with interested and effective parties. So we want to reach as many people as possible. We have a number of you on the line today and you’re people who follow what we do, and we’re very happy for that. But there’s other people we want to reach. I mentioned users. There are seven users on the line today from that first poll. Users are critical. Not all of them are accountants; not all of them follow what we do. So how do we engage with those users?
Delivering high-quality accounting standards, which is, kind of, I always described as our bread and butter. It’s what we do. It's the key thing what we do. But setting the standards for the four parts of the Handbook, but also not forgetting that we need to support implementation and application of the standards. Mark is going to talk a little bit later about the Guidance Framework, and we’ll talk about how we’re doing that.
And then lastly, expanding in international influence. So when we talk about international influence, that’s not just about our influence on the IASB and IFRS standards, but what role do we play with other national standard-setters in sharing best practices on our domestic standards and learning what they’re doing from a domestic standard and how that can influence our domestic standard-setting. So that’s where we’re going. That’s what’s in our proposed strategic plan. Like I said, I’m just so excited to hear from all of you when you comment on the strategic plan. But I think to start, Mark, I think you’re going to open up another polling question.
Mark Squire: That’s right. Here’s our next polling question, So I’ll launch that now.
It looks like people are answering those polling questions. So yes, again, we’ll ask what you think the AcSB should be focusing on when delivering this next strategic plan. So do you think fostering meaningful engagement with interest and affected parties or delivering high-quality accounting standards, supporting the effective implementation and application of accounting standards or expanding international influence? If these are important to you, please answer the poll, and we’ll share that.
Armand Capisciolto: Yes, Mark. As I’m watching the results come in—a lot of all of the above. No none of the above, which is a really good thing! I’m glad that there’s no none of the above, and no one picked that just because I just said that now. But then when I look at those that are picking a specific one of what’s important, it’s interesting “supporting effective implementation application of accounting standards” seems to be at the top of that list, which is very interesting. Thanks.
So we can close that poll. And, Mark, I think you’re now going to talk about recently issued an amended standard.
Mark Squire: That’s correct. So this slide provides a summary of recently issued domestic accounting standards and amendments and the effective dates for each of those. So I’ll give an overview of each of these different projects. The first two items on the list relate to Section 3840, Related Party Transactions. These were issued in 2023 and 2025, and both affect accounting for related party combinations. The 2023 amendments clarified accounting for combinations between entities under common control, and those are effective for years beginning on or after January 1, 2025. The amendments issued in 2025 are in response to an application question that was received regarding those 2023 amendments. The 2025 amendments are effective for years beginning on or after January 1, 2026. And we’ll actually talk about that topic a little bit later when we talk about the Guidance Framework.
The new accounting guideline—AcG-21, Accounting for Life Insurance Contracts with Cash Surrender Value—is effective for years beginning on or after January 1, 2026. This is what I’m actually very passionate about because I’ve worked on this project. This was actually one of the first projects that I worked on when I joined the Accounting Standards Board as a staff member. So I’m excited to see that the effective date has now come in. So everyone will be getting to use that and apply that to that new accounting guideline.
The Amendments to Sections 3041, Agriculture, and 4600, Pension Plans, are both effective for years beginning on or after January 1, 2027. And the last item on our list is the Amendments to Section 3400, Revenue – Upfront Non-refundable Fees and Payments. The effective date of these amendments was deferred, with early application permitted pending the outcome of the Evaluating the Preface project. The AcSB has now concluded its research on evaluating the Preface and is considering the next steps related to this project. We’ve included a slide in the Appendix with more information on this and a link to the project page if you wish to follow updates on this project. And the Appendix includes information on each of these topics in those later slides.
I’ll next talk about the AcSB’s Guidance Framework. The Guidance Framework sets out the structured approach for determining when guidance is needed either to address an application issue or to support the implementation of new or amended accounting standards. And before I get into the framework itself, it’s helpful to clarify what is meant by guidance. When we talk about authoritative guidance, we’re talking about the standards in the Handbook—those numbered standards and the accounting guidelines that you see when you log into Knotia or look at a paper copy of a book if you still have one of those.
The non-authoritative guidance includes items such as the Basis for Conclusions that accompanies the standards, the In Briefs, webinars such as this one and others, podcasts. Those are things that help explain and support the application of the standards. In recent years, the board has received an increasing number of application questions from interested and affected parties on issues and practice, typically in areas involving the exercise of professional judgment. There’s more complicated areas. We’ve also heard that interested and affected parties find that there’s few readily available guidance materials and tools out there for the domestic standards. So as a result, the board identified a need for a more structured approach to developing guidance. So when they receive an application question or a guidance question, what do they do? How do they approach that? The Guidance Framework handles that, and it addresses both application issues for current standards and also implementation issues for new or recently amended standards. And I’ll take you through the process of this on the next slide.
So, this slide with all these fun arrows shows the process that the board goes through when they receive an application question or when they identify an issue. The first step is to determine whether the application issue identified meets the criteria for further discussion. So that identifies kind of the next steps right away. We assess first the prevalence and diversity of the issue and the impact of the accounting income on users’ decisions. These criteria are available on the AcSB’s website. So if you want to understand the process and this provides transparency on how issues are considered by the board, we encourage people submitting application issues to address those criteria in their submission. So it’s always helpful to see who’s going to be affected and what the impact of an accounting issue is going to be on the financial statements.
So when an issue is identified that does meet these criteria, it’s discussed by the relevant domestic advisory committee at one of their meetings. The board has quite a few different committees for different purposes. There’s a Private Enterprise Committee and a Not-for-Profit Committee and things like that. And then the board uses the feedback from the advisory committee to determine what are the next steps on an accounting issue. And that can include undertaking a standard-setting project, issuing some non-authoritative guidance or taking no further action, depending on the outcome of that decision.
In the next section, I’ll discuss a narrow scope amendment related to related party business combinations as I mentioned earlier. This is kind of a one of those success stories of the Guidance Framework.
So as I mentioned in our slide on recently issued Accounting Standards and Amendments, the 2023 Amendments to Section 3840, those were issued in 2023. And those introduced an option for combinations between entities under common control to either retrospectively restate all prior periods when carrying values are used to account for combination, or to prospectively account for these transactions from the date that the combination occurred. And the board received some application questions around this related to specifically the perspective option and what comparative information, if any, should be presented when accounting for one of these combinations.
The topic was first discussed with the AcSB’s Private Enterprise Advisory Committee, and feedback from those discussions indicated diverse views in practice. One view was the enterprises must identify one of the combining enterprises as the acquirer and present comparative figures for that entity only. Another view was that enterprises should apply professional judgment and consider the needs of financial statement users. And in some cases, the determination was that no comparative figures would be presented. So, very different outcomes from what people thought they should do with this new amendment.
Given that diversity and the feedback from the Private Enterprise Advisory Committee, the board decided to issue additional guidance to clarify the application of those Amendments. Those are the 2025 Amendments, and the resulting narrow scope amendment that was issued in December 2025 focuses on how to apply the prospective option and introduces flexibility and how the combined entities are presented. So when there’s one of these combinations, the combined entities may be treated as a new entity with no comparatives presented or a continuation of one of the combining enterprises with comparatives for that entity presented. So, this demonstrates how the Guidance Framework is working in practice and resulted in an Amendment to addressing address an issue that was identified.
So now, I’ll pass it back to Armand to start our discussion of the AcSB’s domestic standards work plan and the projects we’re currently working on.
Armand Capisciolto: And Mark, just one quick comment on the Guidance Framework. There’s a link to the project pages on for each of them. If we decide to do nothing, we do still put something in our decision summary. And all those excerpts from the decision summaries can now be found on those project pages. So there is a place to look for all the discussions we have related to issues people raise. So I highly recommend people check those out.
As far as our current work plan, let’s get right into a project that I think people are interested in. Based on the feedback we've received, it’s the Subsequent Measurement of Goodwill and Acquired Intangible Assets.
So what have we heard over the years, and when I say over the years—over a long number of years, we have heard that business combination accounting is very expensive and it has limited benefits. We’ve heard even many users back out the impacts of this combination accounting. So, the cost-benefit test is not being met for all entities. And when the cost-benefit test isn’t being met, that means we should probably look at the standard again. So, what have we done? We’ve issued an Exposure Draft, Relief from Recognition, and Exposure Drafts on this topic. What does that Exposure Draft propose?
Well, it basically proposes—if we go to the next slide—it basically proposes an accounting policy choice. And in this accounting policy choice, it starts off with the recognition of intangibles in a business combination and basically a choice to not recognize intangibles in a business combination. And, therefore, everything will end up— all those intangibles will be subsumed into goodwill.
And then we have disclosures about the nature of our qualitative disclosure with the nature of those assets that are being subsumed into goodwill.
If you’re choosing that, there is a requirement to amortize goodwill. But even if you don’t choose that, we’ve also allowed another option of a policy choice to amortize goodwill.
As far as the amortization period, we’ve put in a default period in the proposals that default period, basically, which is a short period. And we understand that we’ve heard a lot of feedback on that five-year period. A short period. But if you choose it, you choose the default period. There’s nothing to substantiate as to why you’re picking another period. You can choose a different period—other than five years—but not exceed 10% if you can demonstrate that a useful life would be of a longer useful life, or different useful life than five years would be more appropriate.
So where are we on this project right now? We’ve received a lot of basically positive feedback on it. There’s been some questions, some interesting comments on some of the details, which we are working through. We’ve just recently discussed that with our Private Enterprise Advisory Committee. And tomorrow we’ll be talking about it with our Medium and Small Practitioners Advisory Committee, and then the board will be considering what we do with these comments at our June meeting. But in general, there is a ton of support for these proposals.
They are going to—I think when we hear back from people—significantly reduce reporting burden and provide relief when that relief is needed. Not everybody will need that relief. And that’s why it’s a choice.
So where are we on this? As I said, the board will be discussing this at our June meeting in a couple of weeks. Right now, we are on pace to have this in the Handbook by the second half— First half! Sorry, not second half! First half of 2027. And once we get in the Handbook, the early adoption will be available as well.
So really excited about this project—the project that people have been asking for a long time, and I’m really happy that we are looking like we’ll be able to deliver on that.
The other major project that we have on is something we’ve been calling the Detailed Review of ASPE. And this detailed review of ASPE is really about our strategic priority in our 2022–2027 Strategic Plan about exploring scaling in the standards. And some of you may remember we actually did a consultation paper a while back exploring scalability in Canada, and we received a lot of feedback. And I will say one of the bits of feedback that we received that surprised me was that ASPE can be too complex.
And as a result, we took on a second consultation paper being this Detailed Review of ASPE. And what we did in this second consultation paper is we did a bunch of research, found areas that people were struggling with, and put potential solutions out there and asked people to comment on those solutions. And again, feedback we received was very positive.
We have made some tentative decisions at our March meeting. Beyond those tentative decisions, I just want to highlight that the feedback that we received in this detailed review is going to impact our annual plans for a number of years. Because although we’ve made some decisions on what we’re going to do in the next 12 months, this is a strategic priority for us. It remains a future priority for us—scalability. So it will impact plans going forward. So what have we decided to do in this next year?
We decided to take on a project to develop some additional guidance on impairment testing for long-lived assets. And this is an area we have heard that is a struggle for interested and effective parties. We’ve also decided to take on a research project related to related party transactions.
Related party transactions. When I think about the areas where we get a lot of questions, those questions often relate to related party transactions. We have made some narrow scope amendments in the past, and, being very transparent here, every time we make a narrow scope amendment to related party transactions, we hear about all the other narrow scope amendments we make to related party transactions. So I think when we do this research, we’re going to be looking at related party transactions more holistically.
The other thing is, in our consultation paper we had concluded that we didn’t think there was anything to do with stock-based compensation. A number of you, the vast majority of you who responded, disagreed with our conclusion on that. So we have decided to add stock-based compensation to a topic that is within the scope of this project. And as I said, the items that have been identified as a priority will be considered in future annual plans even though we don’t plan on doing anything in the next 12 months on stock-based compensation. But it is on our list now of something to do in the future.
So as I said, we’ve just finished the consultation paper. We now have made some decisions on what we’re going to do in the next 12 months and kind of put things on a list for beyond that. In addition, we will be issuing a project summary later this year to really give people a summary of what we did here and kind of lay out some of our plans for the future.
Okay. So we have another poll here. So this is related to our research on related party transactions. So when you think about related party transactions, what are the areas that give you the greatest challenge? Looking forward to seeing what wins or maybe loses on this poll.
Mark Squire: So far, it looks like measurement challenges is in the lead for this.
Armand Capisciolto: Yes, not surprised the measurement challenges are in the lead. Measurement challenges followed by all of the above, Mark. I don’t think we’re surprised by that.
Mark Squire: I’m surprised that three people said none of the above. Maybe there’s something we’re missing. We need to look closer.
Armand Capisciolto: We need to talk to those three people. They have all the solutions. Okay. So let’s keep on going.
Another project that we are working on is our Financial Statement Concepts. So, why are we taking on a Financial Statement Concepts project? We have not touched concepts for Parts II and III since before we moved to our multi-framework approach in 2011. So basically it’s been a while, and we felt we needed to review and update concepts to make sure they were fit for purposes for the current environment.
What are we doing in this project? I think, first of all, we’re clarifying the intended purpose of concepts, which is an important thing. And I want to reiterate this. Concepts should not be used to replace or override the requirements in a standard. Concepts themselves, even though they currently show up as Section 1000, Section 1001 in Part III, they are not a standard. They do not override what a standard says. So I think we’re clarifying that. And I think what’s important as well is even though we’re updating concepts, we do not feel that will increase the complexity for preparers and practitioners because it does not have any impact on the application of the current standards. The current standards stand, and we’re not necessarily going to revisit the new standards because we are updating concepts. Because I think—if we go to the next slide, Mark—and I’m going to start with the bottom and move to the top, whom are concepts for? Concepts are ultimately for us as the board to support our standard-setting decisions and make sure we’re setting standards in a consistent fashion. We can choose as a standard-setter to deviate from concepts if we feel that that would provide more decision-useful information.
Concepts are helpful as well to prepare some practitioners when there’s a new accounting, a new emerging area and there isn’t accounting for it. And they also support the application professional judgment as well. And I think one of the things we’re going to do in the improved concepts, like I said before, is clarify when and how those concepts should be used.
As far as some of the decisions that we’ve made to date, we have decided to develop a single set of concepts that will handle both Part II and Part III. I think this is really important because if you’re in Part III, you’re also applying Part II. So I think by having a single set of concepts, it will remind us as standard-setters that when we are setting standards in Part II, it could also impact not-for-profit folks. And it will be located outside of the— It’s still in the Handbook. Okay. I just want to make sure it's there. Concepts will be in the Handbook, but they will be outside of the section, which the standards are in, so that it’s clear they are not a standard and they don’t override a standard as I said before. Our approach to developing these is we have started actually the IFRS for SMEs Concepts and also looked at the IASB’s Conceptual Framework and identified areas where additional guidance update and updated terminology are helpful for Canadian contacts. And all of this— you’re going to see an Exposure Draft in the near future, but we have been spending a ton of times talking to our advisory committees on these concepts. So they’ve fed into the work significantly.
And so where are we on this one? We are currently in the final stages of developing the ED, and although we don’t have a timeline for the ED yet, we are getting very close to that ED stage. So be on the lookout for that in the near future.
And with that, I’m going to turn the discussion of contributions over to Mark. Mark was a part of it, is part of this team that’s working on the contributions projects. I didn’t think there was anyone better to talk about it than Mark.
Mark Squire: Thank you, Armand. Yes, I’m part of the team that’s been working on the Contributions project, and I’m sure some of the members of our audience have been following this from the start. This is a project on, obviously, contributions and the revenue recognition and related matters for not-for-profit organizations. The objective of this project is to reduce the complexity and improve the understandability of financial statements for not-for-profit organizations. And I’ll start with a brief recap of the history of this project because it has been going on for some time.
In March 2023, the AcSB issued an Exposure Draft proposing moving to a single method of revenue recognition for restricted contributions. So under that proposal there, there would no longer be a restricted fund method and a deferral method. There would be a single method. It also provided guidance on special types of contributions, such as endowments, capital asset contributions, and contributed materials and services. We call that the 2023 Exposure Draft.
Feedback on that Exposure Draft indicated that many respondents did not support moving to a single recognition method. They raised concerns about the usefulness of the resulting financial statements for some types of organizations, as well as alignment with financial statement concepts. Respondents also noted that presentation and disclosure alone would not adequately address their concerns.
We did look at was it possible to add additional disclosure financial statement presentation so that there would be one method, and users would still receive the information that they needed. And the conclusion was that a single recognition method would not meet the needs of everyone in the not-for-profit sector. So in May 2024, the board issued a feedback statement and revised the project plan accordingly. I’d encourage you if you’re interested in this project to read that because it gives a great background on the information that’s been accrued so far on this project. And the board is now developing a new Exposure Draft. The new Exposure Draft is going to maintain an accounting policy choice, so there would still be two options for recognition of contributions. It would also develop amendments to recognition guidance, hopefully resulting in less complex and more understandable financial statements for not-for-profit organizations.
So we’ve been working on this, as I’ve said, for quite some time. We put a lot of effort into this project. In the summer and fall of 2025, we did field-testing on this. We developed case studies and sent those to interested and affected parties, and this was a really important step to help us understand how the proposals would work in practice and identify any issues early on. Participants in the field-testing expressed general support for the direction of the project. They really liked some of the things that we were working on, and we incorporated their feedback into the proposals that we’re working on. The AcSB has also carried out targeted outreach with interest and affected parties to gather more focused input on the proposals that we’re refining. So we're trying to put a lot of effort into this to get this right.
The board has been holding ongoing discussions with its Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee. I think I’ve spoken at every meeting that they’ve had for the last two years about this project, and they’ve given some fantastic feedback on all of the issues, including definitions, recognition of contributions, the scope of this section transition and the effective date for what will be the proposed new standard. And this is really helping us to develop what we hope is going to be a really high-quality Exposure Draft.
So next steps on this project: We’re currently working on the drafting the final proposals for the Exposure Draft. The plan is to issue these in the fall of 2026. So look for that if you’re interested—not-for-profit accounting. We’d love to hear your feedback on this project. And you can follow the project page on this to stay up to date on this.
Our next topic is another not-for-profit topic. This is actually another project I’m also on a team for. This is our project on Section 4450, Reporting Controlled and Related Entities by Not-for-Profit Organizations. This project aims to improve transparency of financial statements and help financial statement users understand relationships between not-for-profits and the entities that they control and are related to.
For the scope of this project, it’s important to note that this isn’t something that’s going to affect all not-for-profits because many not-for-profits don’t have those sorts of relationships. This will be most relevant to not-for-profits that have controlled and related entities. So this isn’t something that’s going to affect everyone, whereas contributions probably will affect most not-for-profits because most not-for-profits do have contributions.
Through our research and outreach activities, the board identified broad challenges with the assessment of relationships between entities and practice. And as a result of that, through our research, the board decided to expand the scope of the project to explore a new model to assess these relationships and identify control. I will point out an important key decision on this is that the board intends to maintain the option to either consolidate or disclose controlled not-for-profit organizations. So they’re not looking at taking that option away. There’s not going to be a requirement that everything be consolidated.
So in terms of focus areas on this project, the board is looking at improving the definitions and application guidance, enhancing the disclosures related to controlled and related entities and introducing illustrative examples to support consistent application.
So where are we on this project? The board is in the research phase. We’re not at an Exposure Draft yet. We’re currently developing a consultation paper. Consultation paper is to seek feedback on topics that will be addressed in this project going forward. That’s currently in the drafting stage. And this is another project where the board expects to issue this document for comment in the fall of 2026. So this is another stay-tuned; there’ll be something coming and we look forward to hearing feedback on this project from all of our interested and effected parties. And now, I’ll pass it back to Armand to tell you about the package of minor amendments.
Armand Capisciolto: Okay. So package of minor amendments. This is our new name for annual improvements. So, and we’ve changed the name for a couple of reasons. One, we weren’t doing these things annually. So we thought the “annual” didn’t really fit. And I think it’s a better description of what we’re doing. What we do with this package of minor amendments is we basically package minor narrow enough, narrow amendments into one Exposure Draft even though the topics aren’t related.
So we’ve decided to do one of these in our 2026–2027 Annual Plan. Some of the items have been our long-standing items. Some are issues that have been identified in our Guidance Framework as well where we decided standard-setting was needed. So if we go to the next slide, this is our— the board tentatively decided to include the topics on this slide in our package of minor amendments. This is a very tentative discussion because these were the tentative decisions before going to our advisory committees. We recently discussed this with our Private Enterprise Advisory Committee. We’re discussing it tomorrow with our Medium and Small Practitioners Advisory Committee, and then it’ll be going back to the board to make final decisions on what we include in this package.
I think— A couple of things: When we think about what gets included in the package of minor amendments, these are things to clarify the wording in the standard; correct relatively minor unintended consequences, oversights or conflicts between existing requirements and standards. But I think it’s important: Whenever we clarify something, whenever we change the words, it may change practice. Just because these are minor doesn’t mean they will not change practice for people. So we do recommend to pay attention once these get issued to make sure you fully understand what we’re proposing and provide your comments.
As far as next steps, we plan to issue Exposure Draft after the second half of 2026 on this for the package of minor amendments. So be on the lookout for that.
The other— and this is going to be a new scope of amendment. We actually discussed whether or not this should be in the package of minor amendments at the board. We decided to do this separately. I refer to this project as the bank rec project. Why do I call it the bank rec project? And for those of you who don’t follow IFRS, you may not even be aware of this. But what ended up happening is the IASB made some amendments to their standards related to electronic payments. And when making those amendments, they did something in their Basis for Conclusions that basically said we’re not doing anything for cheques and, therefore, cheques must be recorded when settled.
And we said, well, that’s interesting because the words in IFRS are the exact same as the words in ASPE.
And if you record cheques when settled, that means you don’t have outstanding cheques. And I think we all have been doing bank recs for a long time, and we all deal with outstanding cheques and bank recs.
So what are we doing with this project?
We are going to be proposing some amendments, which really are not to align with what they did in IFRS but really to allow current practice to continue so that no one says, “Well, the words are the exact same as IFRS. Therefore, why do you have outstanding cheques in ASPE and you don’t have outstanding checks in IFRS?” We don’t want to change practice. I assume most of you like the way you do your bank recs and don’t want to change your bank recs. So that’s what we are planning on proposing with this one.
This is right now. We’re in the project plan approval stage, not at Exposure Draft yet. But we are hoping to have an Exposure Draft for the second half of this year, probably to come out around the same time as the package of minor amendments.
The last project I’m going to talk about before we open it up for questions is our project that we have planned for Part IV. So we did a work plan survey to those interested and affected parties that follow our pension plan accounting. And based on that work plan survey, we’ve decided to take on a research project related to non-traditional pension plans. And what the heck do I mean by non-traditional pension plans? These are plans that kind of don’t fit nicely into a DB or DC plan. They have some kind of— they have elements that are both DB and DC. Some of them are called shared-risk plans; some, they’re called targeted plans.
So we’re doing some research on them. So what is our research going to entail? Understanding the common features of these plans, assessing whether or not the accounting outcomes that people are coming to with the current 4600 are working or not working. And then if they’re not working, do we have to do something? If they are working, maybe we don’t have to do something. But we will be working with our Pension Plan Advisory Committee on this. And for those of you that follow pension plan accounting or have one of these plans, it’s going to be a very interesting project.
So with that, I will turn it over to Mark, who will quickly go over how to get involved. But in the meantime, if you have questions, you can send your questions in for the Q&A, and we will attempt to get to some of them before our time runs out.
Mark Squire: Great! Thank you. So there’s lots of ways that you can get involved with the work of the AcSB. On this slide, we have some contact information for our staff that are responsible for various parts of the Handbook. So we always want to know what you’re thinking. We’re always interested to here from our interested and affected parties. You can send us comments through the website; you can send us emails. You can also volunteer to join one of our advisory committees. So the board has all sorts of advisory committees for various purposes. There’s a Private Enterprise Advisory Committee for generally for-profits, Not-for-Profit Advisory Committee for not-for-profits. As Armand mentioned, we have our meeting tomorrow for the Medium and Small Practitioners Advisory Committee, which gives us feedback from people in medium and small accounting firms. So all of these and various others that you can be involved in.
We post volunteer or recruitment— We have recruitment posts generally once a year, but if you’re interested in this, send us an e-mail with your interest, and we’ll consider you when we come around on our recruitment cycle and we have room on these committees. If you have questions on specific projects you want to share your views, you can contact the staff listed on this slide. Or for each of our projects, we have a page on the website that has contact information for the responsible staff, and you can reach out to them as well.
To stay up to date on our projects, we have a biweekly e-newsletter that you can sign up for. You can also follow us on social media and see posts about that. Here, we have a link to the quiz, and we also have a QR code that you can scan to get your quiz. If you complete that successfully, you’ll be emailed a certificate. It does take about ten minutes. We did this as a test yesterday, and it took about ten minutes for me to get the quiz e-mail to me. So if you don’t get it within the first thirty seconds, just wait a little bit longer. If you do have any problems, reach out to us.
And that concludes our presentation. We now have some time to look at some questions here.
Armand, I don’t know if there’s any specific question you want to tackle first?
Armand Capisciolto: There was one that disappeared, but I’m going to answer it any way. Where in IFRS does it say that you don’t have outstanding cheques? Those words don’t exist. It doesn’t say you don’t have outstanding cheques. What it does say is that other than things that are accounted for on— other than kind of securities trading, which you have a choice of trade date or settlement date, the wording says everything is recorded on settlement date. And then when they made the recent amendments for electronic payments, they made that abundantly clear in their Basis for Conclusions. But again, the words are very similar in ASPE. And the reason we’re are proposing changes is just because IFRS change doesn't mean we need to change in ASPE, and we want to allow people to continue current practice.
Mark, I know you had a couple that came in earlier. I don’t know if we wanted to go to one of those.
Mark Squire: Yes, we got a great question here! When will I be able to apply the proposals for goodwill and intangible assets?
Armand Capisciolto: Well, to a certain extent it depends on when we get the standard finalized. So I think, right now we’re shooting towards getting it issued in the first half of 2027. So what does that mean? We’ll allow early adoption. So if you have an acquisition and a 2026 year-end and if you wait until the standard is issued, you can apply it to that 2026 year-end.
So we're doing our best to get it done as quickly as possible because we know there is a demand. People have been asking for this for some time. And as soon as it’s in the Handbook, you can apply it, and you can apply it to your ends that are not complete yet.
Mark Squire: Excellent! I see there’s a comment saying that the link does not work. I just tested it myself, and it works for me. So maybe check your computer. That might be an issue on your end. Otherwise, the link will stay available for quite some time. So if you can’t complete the quiz today, that’s all right. You can do that again in the future.
We have another question here about our contributions project. Is there a concern with maintaining to accounting methods for contributions, and will that result in a lack of comparability for financial statement users?
Armand Capisciolto: Yes, Mark, I think this is something the board wrestled with when we made the decision a while ago to maintain the two methods. I think a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about with this one: What we heard is the information needs can be very different for not-for-profit, depending on is it a foundation versus maybe broader public sector versus an entity providing services to members. One of the things we’re acknowledging in our current strategic plan is resource constraints are also an issue. And so I think when we thought about consistency versus meeting the very varied information needs of the various types of users is not-for-profit financial statements because we talk about not-for-profits like they’re— like that’s a sector, but there are multiple sectors within not-for-profit organizations. So we felt that the cost of moving to one did not outweigh the benefits of moving to one model. And when I reflect on— and we made this decision before we started going down this path of the detailed review. Policy choices is something that’s going to come out of some of the projects we’re taking on with the detailed review. So I actually don’t think it’s— I also think it’s consistent with where we’re going with scalability in general. That scale— to be scalable, you have to provide choices. So I think comparability is always an issue. And when you have policy choices, there’s going to be an impact on comparability. But then we have to think about the benefits of that comparability and the cost of that comparability. And that cost-benefit test will not be met in all cases. And I think not-for-profits is one of those scenarios with contributions.
Mark Squire: Thank you. We’re just about at time now. It’s 11:59. So I think that’s all the time we have for questions today. Armand, unless you have any closing remarks you’d like to share?
Armand Capisciolto: The only thing I’d like to say is just again I’m going to reiterate our strategic plan is open for comments. And actually, one of the questions that came up could fit right in quite nicely into a response on a strategic plan related to international engagement. But I just encourage people to read it and respond. And I would say just in general, whenever we put anything out for comment, we do this whole formal process of a comment letter and we ask a bunch of questions and people think they have to answer every single question. You don’t; you can send us an e-mail just on what’s relevant to you. It’s sometimes easier to show up in an outreach event. There are many ways to get involved. We want to hear from you, and we want to hear from you in the way you want to communicate with us. We’re a very open group. Reach out to any of the staff. Reach out to me if you have just— That’s my main message to end. Just never worry about reaching out that you’re bugging us. You’re not bugging us. That is our job to talk to you, and we like to do it. So just if you have any comments, questions, concerns, always reach out.
Mark Squire: Great! So Armand, thank you so much for your time today and for being presented on our webinar. And thank you to everyone in the audience for your time today and your participation in in the polls and submitting questions. It’s been a great time. I very much enjoyed that. The on-demand version of this will be posted in a week or so. The slides are available on the website right now. So again, thank you to everyone who participated and attended today, and have a fantastic afternoon!
Armand Capisciolto: Thanks, everyone.