The Australian Accounting Standards Board has this week issued a public call for survey responses on the age-old issue of accounting for intangible assets and disclosing information ¬— the accounting equivalent of the zombie that refuses to die.
Staff at the standard setter are looking for feedback that provides insights into whether there is enough information on intangible assets in accounts.
"If not, should any information gap be addressed through amendments to [the intangible assets standard], whether in the form of revised recognition or measurement requirements or, particularly, disclosure requirements?” the board asks.
The survey is a part of research related to internally generated intangible assets that are not currently able to be booked in the financial statements because they are internally generated, no market price has been paid for them, and any kind of valuation of them in the absence of a sale in the active market would be deemed unreliable.
The appeal for answers from folks that crunch numbers and those that audit them is the latest in the saga on accounting for intangibles.
Domestic and international standard setters were busy poking around old territory about whether goodwill ought to be amortised or be dealt with via an impairment approach.
That chestnut was debated in Australia in the mid-1990s when the interpretations body known as the Urgent Issues Group issued a binding interpretation that restricted accounting for goodwill to a straight line method over a period not exceeding 20 years.
The ruling was in response to a creative application of goodwill accounting by a company that used a method known as the inverted sum of years digits method at that time.