Pensions assets and liabilities will begin appearing on the face of 2006 corporate balance sheets beginning with calendar-year-end companies, following the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s action to finalize its latest statement of accounting standards.
In the first of two phases to overhaul how companies account for pensions and other retirement benefits, FASB is requiring companies to promote the funding status of such benefits from a footnote disclosure to a line item on the balance sheet. The goal is to give more prominence to any liability companies may be carrying related to promised—but underfunded— benefits, which increasingly has become the norm for public companies.
