Banking Day was the only media organisation represented in the virtual public gallery for the historic first public meeting of the Financial Reporting Council held yesterday.
Only one journalist in a group of 17, with the balance being folks directly involved one way or another in the standard setting process, oversight or in government.
It is curious that this was the case in some respects because the FRC had been the target for some harsh scrutiny as a result of the coverage of the of the retirement payments that PricewaterhouseCoopers provides the chairman of the FRC, Bill Edge.
Those payments were characterised as a conflict of interest of sorts because of the work the FRC does in relation to audit regulation and monitoring matters regarding auditor independence.
What people miss is that yesterday’s public meeting – the first in more than two decades of the FRC’s existence – was actually in part at the instigation of Edge, a previous chairman of the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board in the days when the audit standard setting function was overseen by the professional accounting bodies.
An historic occasion like this did not attract other players that had been attracted to the council’s work more because of sensationalism rather than an actual desire to properly explore the financial reporting framework and its vast array of nuances.
There was a private 30 minute session at the start of proceedings and this writer was dropped into the fray at about 10.30 in the morning.
It was a meeting that had a cracking pace and it covered many things including the topic of the moment: sustainability reporting. There was a constant buzz around that topic with Joanna Perry providing an update in the afternoon on behalf of the IFRs Foundation Trustees.
The Trustees have been urged to get on with sustainability reporting and Perry told the FRC that is precisely what they intend to do.
Keith Kendall, the AASB chairman, alerted the FRC to the fact that there is a A$300,000 Australian Research Council grant that has gone to a team of academics from a range of universities for a project looking at climate reporting.
The auditing and accounting standard setters are industry partners for the exercise and that will involve a deep dive into how the issues related to climate ought to be reported.
This project comes in the context of the greater international push for sustainability reporting and the prioritisation of climate reporting. There is also the focus on climate accounting for want of a better word in the Biden administration over yonder in the United States.
Biden signed an executive order within the first day of becoming president demanding that the climate accounting improve and that departments report their progress.
Cyber security and the role of auditors in looking at client systems cropped up as well as a topic called extended reporting.
Strategic directions for the FRC came up for discussion, too, and there was a brief but reflective discussion on whether the council ought to have the issue of the decline in registered company auditors on the list of things they set as priorities for the next little while.
Aspects of the entire reporting framework were touched on and those that were not spoken about were detailed in well written agenda papers that were generally taken as read unless a member of the FRC found something in them to get a tad excited about.
Agenda papers were available a few days before the meeting was held. These are an impressive resource in their own right and they map the progress of the standard setters on a range of issues.
The contributions were generally forthright and there was little evidence of people modifying language to suit a public meeting.