ACCA welcomes the opportunity to provide views in response to the IASB’s exposure draft (ED) for the third edition of the IFRS for SMEs Accounting Standard (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Standard’). This was done with the assistance of ACCA’s Global Forum for Corporate Reporting. It has also been informed by global member interviews, outreach events and roundtables held in the African and the ASEAN region, in India and an open forum between November 2022 and January 2023.
The comprehensive review of the Standard undertaken by the IASB is timely given the major changes introduced in the full IFRS Accounting Standards, in turn resulting in risks of unintended and potentially unnecessary divergence of reporting between the two systems of accounting and reporting. ACCA believes that the Standard should mainly be the result of simplifications to accounting treatments and reductions in disclosure requirements that reflect the different cost/benefit effects for SMEs and the needs of the users of their financial statements.
Both the full IFRS Accounting Standards and the Standard should be the benchmark for national accounting requirements. Keeping alignment between them at the level of definition, main recognition and measurement requirements for different accounting items is important to:
The Standard plays a significant role in bringing greater transparency, clarity and accountability for businesses everywhere
To read the response in full, please download the consultation response document.