AASB Staff Paper Intangible Assets: Reducing the Financial Statements Information Gap through Improved Disclosures

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The AASB has released a Staff Paper Intangible Assets: Reducing the Financial Statements Information Gap through Improved Disclosures. The Paper aims to facilitate discussion of possible solutions to a perceived financial statements information gap relating to intangible assets, focusing on disclosures about unrecognised internally generated intangible assets that could be made in financial statements, having regard to costs and benefits.

The AASB Staff Paper considers:

• a spectrum of possible disclosures, whether of a financial (cost or fair value) or non-financial (quantitative, non-quantitative or narrative) nature, or a combination of all or some thereof, that could be made in financial statements;
• the types of entities that should be subject to the disclosures;
• whether the disclosures should be mandated or encouraged; and
• how a standard-setting project could be structured and progressed to achieve timely improvements to disclosures.

As a first step, the Paper concludes that consideration could be given to making improvements to the current approach to disclosures about unrecognised internally generated intangible assets by publicly-accountable for-profit private-sector entities.