Let’s look at what the Oxford English Dictionary thinks of the word.’ This presumably is what the non-accountant believes it should be. Accountants use the word ‘probable’ most of the time for an accounting event in the future. The Oxford English Dictionary, define probable, in the context of this accounting event, as something which can…
The authors of IAS 8 get completely mixed up with their terms. Retrospective application, retrospective restatement and prospective application are too much to take in on a first read. But even reading each definition ten times does not make it easier. Let’s take just one of them: “Retrospective restatement is correcting the recognition, measurement and disclosure of…
The most complicated IFRS Standard is IFRS 9 which tries to regulate financial instruments. I will quote just one sentence from it, as an example, which might be easy to understand for a specialist in financial instruments but which is impossible to understand for the mere accountant preparing financial statements. The first line is encouraging…
For those who have not read IAS 37, I must show the first part of the definition of a constructive obligation. Their choice of alliteration in part a) is quite spectacular: “A constructive obligation is an obligation that derives from an entity’s actions where: a) by an established pattern of past practice, published policies or a sufficiently…
The IAS board failed miserably in IFRS 13 with their ‘inputs’. They completely lacked any imagination by using level 1 inputs, level 2 inputs and level 3 inputs. This lack of imagination is, I suppose, useful because it is quite impossible the guess what they could mean without reading the standard. Observable inputs and unobservable…