IASB's Business Combinations — Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment consultation

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has published a comprehensive discussion paper DP/2020/1 'Business Combinations — Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment'. The IASB's related project aims at improving the information companies provide to investors, at a reasonable cost, about the businesses those companies buy and would help to hold management to account for its decisions to acquire those businesses.

ACCA welcomes the opportunity to provide views in response to the IASB’s discussion paper on business combinations. This has been done with the assistance of members of ACCA’s Global Forum for Corporate Reporting. 

ACCA considers that the proposed disclosures of the objectives and rationale for acquisitions and the monitoring of the performance against those objectives will provide very useful information for investors. They will go a long way to meet the stewardship issues that are raised by acquisitions. We agree that these should be required for material acquisitions only. The disclosure of expected synergies will likewise provide useful information but they raise more issues of commercial sensitivity. There is a case for exempting unlisted companies from both sets of these disclosures.

To read the response in full, please download the consultation response document.