The Financial Accounting Standards Board and its overseas counterpart, the International Accounting Standards Board, have formed a new joint international working group on performance reporting.
The working group has been set up to help the boards in their joint project to establish standards for the presentation of information in financial statements that would improve the usefulness of that information in assessing the financial performance of a business enterprise.
The working group consists of 24 members, including Peter R. Bible, chief accounting officer of General Motors Corp.; Gregory Jonas, managing director of Moody's Investors Service; Michael P. Krzus, a director at Grant Thornton LLP; Patricia McConnell, senior managing director of Bear Stearns; and Wolfgang H. Reichenberger, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Swiss-based Nestlé SA.
Previously, FASB and the IASB conducted separate projects on the topic, but suspended their disparate projects in late 2003 and agreed in the interests of convergence to conduct a joint project in April 2004.
The IASB said that while all types of entities are within the scope of the joint project, the boards haven't appointed representatives from financial institutions in the preparer category to the working group, because they decided that the reporting needs of financial institutions should be considered separately from those of other sectors.
Financial institutions will remain within the scope of the project, but the boards plan to set up a specialist subgroup to examine the reporting needs of financial institutions. Members of that subgroup will be selected from those already nominated as financial institutions preparers and from members of the IASB's financial instruments and insurance working groups. The boards will also ask each of the IASB working groups to provide a representative as an official observer at meetings of the new working group.
Official observers of the working group include the European Financial Reporting Advisory Group, the International Organization of Securities Commissions, the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, and the IASB Financial Instruments and Insurance Working Group.
