With an admission that maybe they’ve bitten off more than they can chew, accounting rulemakers have decided to take a break from two separate projects that once appeared prominently on their priority list for converging U.S. and international accounting rules.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board met in a joint session last week to make progress on a number of major initiatives to revise both U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and International Financial Reporting Standards. They agreed they’ve stretched their respective staffs to capacity and can’t proceed any further on a long-running effort to revise the overall presentation of financial statements, nor with a project to better define how to treat financial instruments that look and feel a lot like equity.
