The Financial Accounting Standards Board will issue its last three accounting standards in the coming weeks, two of them next week when it publishes new statements of accounting related to off-balance-sheet activity.

“This doesn’t mean we’re going home and shutting down the lights,” said FASB Technical Director Russell Golden in an update on accounting standards at Compliance Week 2009 this week. To be sure, there are plenty of new accounting rules to be written as FASB continues revising Generally Accepted Accounting Principles on a convergence path with international standards. But in the future they’ll be proposed and published as revisions to the Accounting Standards Codification, which becomes the new accounting rule book for all of GAAP effective July 1.

In off-balance-sheet accounting, the board plans to publish Financial Accounting Statements No. 166 and No. 167 in about a week to change the way entities account for special purpose entities that have long been held off the balance sheet. Golden acknowledged the standards generally will require financial institutions to bring a significant measure of assets onto corporate balance sheets when they are effective with the beginning of 2010, and that fact has been taken into account by regulators assessing banks’ general health.

“I do expect there to be more assets and liabilities on institutions’ balance sheets as result of this,” he said. “I believe Treasury and the Federal Reserve conducting these stress tests did include an assumption that the 19 largest banks under stress tests would have these assets and liabilities on their balance sheets.”

FAS 166 will be a revision to the existing FAS 140: Accounting for Transfers and Servicing of Financial Assets and Extinguishments of Liabilities to provide more information about transfers of financial assets and where companies may have continuing exposure to assets they’ve transferred off the balance sheet. It eliminates the concept of the “qualifying special purpose entity,” changes the requirements for derecognizing financial assets, and requires additional disclosures.

FAS 167 will be a revision to Financial Interpretation No. 46R: Consolidation of Variable Interest Entities to change how a company determines when an off-balance-sheet entity should be consolidated. It will require companies to perform not only a quantitative analysis but also a qualitative analysis of control or involvement in off-balance-sheet assets to determine when they should be consolidated.

The final accounting standard to be issued in the traditional format will say that FASB’s Codification is the sole authority for GAAP beginning July 1. The Codification is an online search and retrieval tool that organizes GAAP rules according to topic. Once the Codification is authoritative, FASB will continue to update it with new rules, but they will simply be updates to the Codification and not accounting standards, staff positions, or other pronouncements as they’ve traditionally been issued.