The Financial Accounting Standards Board has deferred some of the rules it issued earlier this year to make the presentation of other comprehensive income more prominent on financial statements.
FASB issued on Friday issued
The new update defers the requirement to present items that are reclassified from accumulated other comprehensive income to net income separately with their respective components of net income and other comprehensive income.
Earlier this year, the FASB issued Accounting Standards Update No. 2011-05, “Comprehensive Income (Topic 220): Presentation of Comprehensive Income.” The update aimed to increase the prominence of other comprehensive income in financial statements and help financial statement users better understand the cause of a company’s change in financial position and results of operations. Stakeholders, however, recently raised concerns that the new presentation requirements about the reclassification of items out of accumulated other comprehensive income would be costly for preparers and add unnecessary complexity to financial statements.
As a result of these concerns, FASB said it has decided to reconsider whether it is necessary to require companies to present reclassification adjustments by component in both the statement where net income is presented and the statement where other comprehensive income is presented for both interim and annual financial statements. However, FASB has not deferred the requirement to reprt comprehensive income either in a single continuous statement or in two separate but consecutive financial statements.
To defer only those changes in Update 2011-05 that relate to the presentation of reclassification adjustments, the amendments in this update supersede only those paragraphs that pertain to how and where reclassification adjustments are presented.
FASB said it is considering the operational concerns about the presentation requirements for classification adjustments, but entities will continue to report reclassifications out of accumulated comprehensive income consistent with the presentation requirements in effect before Update 2011-05.
The amendments are effective at the same time as the amendments in Update 2011-05. Therefore, the amendments in the latest update are effective for public entities for fiscal years, and interim periods within those years, beginning after Dec. 15, 2011.
For nonpublic companies and not-for-profit organizations, the amendments in the latest update are effective for fiscal years ending after Dec. 15, 2012, and interim and annual periods thereafter.
The latest update is available at
