Private Company Committee Meets on Standards

The Private Company Financial Reporting Committee met last week to discuss some of the standards that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has been proposing and postponing.

The committee operates under the auspices of both FASB and the American Institute of CPAs, and has also been involved recently with the Blue Ribbon Panel on Standard Setting for Private Companies, which included members of FASB, the AICPA and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy.

“We had a closed [door] meeting where we discussed some of the models that the Blue Ribbon Panel staff has been developing and gave them some input on that,” said PCFRC chair Judy O’Dell. “Those will be drafted and available to the Blue Ribbon Panel in the next two weeks or so.”

During last week’s meeting, the committee worked on finalizing a comment letter for FASB’s Conceptual Framework Reporting Entity Committee. It also discussed FASB’s recent exposure draft proposing new standards for accounting for financial instruments, and how they might affect private companies, according to O’Dell.

“We discussed the exposure draft on the statement of comprehensive income and we’ll be developing comment letter points on that one as well,” she added.

FASB board member Thomas Linsmeier met with the committee and updated the members on how FASB plans to complete various convergence projects in its memorandum of understanding with the International Accounting Standards Board. FASB and the IASB recently announced that they would be extending the deadlines for several of the standards beyond the original target of June 2011.

“It looks like we will have a longer period of time to comment on these,” said O’Dell. “Public companies will have some extra time, and private companies will have an additional year to implement these standards after the public companies have implemented them.”

O’Dell noted that FASB has revised the dates on its technical plan for various projects to avoid overwhelming people by releasing too many draft standards in any one quarter.

“They are giving their highest priority to joint projects on revenue recognition, leases, other comprehensive income and fair value measurement,” she said.