About 'ifrs 1'|IFRS ——- What is IFRS
The first pension plan offered by an American employer was that of American Express in the year 1875. Amex's plan did not resemble the plans that we see in today's time; the first "modern" defined benefit plan was created in 1940 by the automotive behemoth General Motors. These plans of the past still do not resemble plans that we are familiar with today. In the past, employers could exercise a "pension put" option and, in essence, close the plan down at the current level of funding and turn the assets over to the retirees. This is not an optimal situation, as many plans at the time were severely under funded and retirees would be left with pennies on the dollar of what they were counting on for retirement. (Fortune, 2005) Post-retirement benefits are volatile on a couple of different fronts; up until the reforms in 1974 which created ERISA and the PBGC, employees had to put blind faith in their employers to secure their futures after their working years were over. (Fortune, 2005) On another front, these benefits pose a significant accounting problem - how should a company account for the costs and liabilities associated with these benefits they had to give their employees at a later and relatively indeterminable date? Prior to FAS 87, the only item that a company would record on their financial statements was the actual benefits paid within the accounting period. There were no footnote disclosures or any other supplemental data available. Expensing post-retirement benefits as incurred does not portray the economic reality of the transactions surrounding the pension. There is an inherent liability, as employers are required to pay their employees these benefits in the future. This should affect the value of a company by increasing a long-term pension liability and decreasing the net worth. FAS 87 and FAS 106 were the first efforts by regulators to at least disclose the amount of post-retirement benefit liabilities. The aforementioned pronouncements, along with FAS 132 and 132R, required only footnote disclosures relating to pension liabilities and under funded amounts. Such disclosures were not enough for regulators; in September of 2006 the FASB issued FAS 158 which "requires employers to fully recognize their obligations associated with their defined pension, retiree healthcare, and other postretirement plans in their financial statements. A company must recognize in its statement of financial position the overfunded or underfunded status of a defined benefit postretirement plan, measured as the difference between the fair value of plan assets and the benefit obligation. The measurement date for determining funding status must coincide with the date of the employer's statement of financial position. The impact on the statement of financial position may be significant...All public, nonpublic, and not-for-profit organizations are affected by SFAS 158." (Hurtt, Kreuze, Langsam 2007) It seems that the profession is on the right track in making sure that financial statement accurately reflect the economic realities of even the most complex transactions entered in to. However, there is another variable to consider in this equation: convergence with IFRS. IAS 19 is the international equivalent of FAS 158 in that it deals with how a company is to account for post-retirement expenses. Nevertheless, there are differences between the two methods which will make the pension expense and liabilities different depending on which method is used. Towers Perrin, a global professional services firm, has a grid of summary provisions affecting accounting for postretirement benefits under IAS19 and the various FASs. Large differences include, but are not limited to, the following: Under FAS 158, valuations require the use of a qualified actuary. Under IAS 19, the use of an actuary is only recommended, not required. Under FAS 158, the discount rate used is the rate at which obligation could be effectively settled, generally current rates of return on high-quality fixed income investments with maturities matching duration of benefits obligation. Under IAS 19 the rate used is current rates of return on high-quality corporate bonds with maturities consistent with the duration of benefit obligations. Under FAS 158, the rate of return on plan assets is the expected long term rates over life of the obligation. Under IAS 19, the rate is based on current market expectations over the life of obligation Cost recognized under FAS 158 and IAS 19 is calculated almost exactly the same way. The only difference is that under FAS 106 you can add or subtract temporary deviations from plans. Considering all the differences in IAS 19 and FAS 158 and considering the possibility of convergence with IFRS, it leads to the question of how changing from US GAAP to IFRS would affect the earnings of a company. Would reporting post-retirement benefits under IFRS as opposed to US GAAP be beneficial or detrimental to a company's earnings? There is an inherent limitation due to the compressed timeframe in which results of the study are to be reported. Due to the limitations, companies selected are foreign companies which are publicly traded on various US Stock Exchanges, and thus are listed with the SEC. No domestic corporations are used, as domestic companies report under US GAAP and do not provide financial results under IFRS. Furthermore, starting with years ending after November 15, 2007 the SEC does not require that registrants reporting financial results under IFRS reconcile financial results to US GAAP in the footnotes to the financial statements. Because of this, financial results used are for the year ended December 31, 2006. If the fiscal years of the companies selected did not end on December 31, then the year ended during 2007 was selected. Another limitation for this study is that there are a broad range of industries represented in the sample, and also a broad range of company sizes. Time and resources available to select a sample with similar companies either in size or industries was limited, at best. Had resources and time been greater, it may have been possible to perform an analysis of a sample comprised of similar companies; had that been possible, results could have differed. In addition, it would have been nice to utilize a test group of domestic companies willing to provide a reconciliation of their US GAAP earnings to earnings under IFRS. Furthermore, such reconciliations would be provided for the most recent year end, thus providing more accurate results. The reason that such information would be preferred to use is because domestic companies as opposed to foreign companies is that labor laws and benefits offered to employees may differ across international borders. Utilizing domestic companies would strengthen the study by ensuring that the pension plans analyzed were an accurate sample of pension plans utilized by domestic employers. However, despite the limitations indicated above it is possible that the conclusions drawn from this limited study will be accurate, even if at a very broad and general level. Based on a preliminary review of literature available to answer the question posed, literature and research related to the differences between GAAP and IFRS accounting treatments was unavailable. In turn, the literature review turned to other sciences to see how comparisons between two related sets of information were made. In a research study aimed at classifying neural networks, Rezeki, Subanar, and Guritno stated "we employ the matched pair comparisons to investigate the difference for each two models. The concept of matching or blocking is fundamental to providing a compromise between the two conflicting requirements that the experimental units be alike and also be of different kinds." To test whether post-retirement expenses reported using IFRS had a favorable or unfavorable variance to those reported under US GAAP, the statistical analysis was performed on twenty-six companies listed with the SEC that reported financial results in IFRS and were required to reconcile their results to US GAAP on form 20-F. The sample was chosen by reviewing a list of foreign issuers listed on the SEC website, and haphazardly selecting twenty-six. While making the selection, an effort was made to choose companies that had a presence in the United States. Below is the test group selection: AB Electrolux, Deutsche Bank, Royal Dutch Shell, ABN Amro, Endesa, Smith & Nephew, Alcatel, Fiat, Statoil, Astra Zeneca, Glaxo Smith Kline, Unilever, Aventis, Group Danone, Vimpel Communications, Barclays, Gucci, Vivendi, Benetton Group, ING Group, British Airways, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, British Petroleum, Nokia, Cadbury Schweppes,Philips After the test group was selected, annual financial results for the year ended December 31, 2006 were obtained from the company's website. If the company had a year end that did not fall on December 31, the financial information was for the fiscal year ended no later than 10/31/2007. In the event financial results were not attainable from the company's website, they were located through EDGAR on the SEC website. Once the financial statements were obtained, the footnote reconciliation from IFRS earnings to US GAAP earnings was analyzed to see what amount of adjustments were needed to bring the IFRS pension expense in line with the US GAAP pension expense. The line item adjustment for Post-Retirement Benefits represented the increase or decrease in post-retirement benefit expenses needed to show results under US GAAP. A negative adjustment would indicate that such expenses under US GAAP are higher than the expenses reported under IFRS, and therefore reporting post-retirement benefits using IFRS would be favorable to a company's financial position. Conversely, a positive adjustment would indicate that the expenses under US GAAP are lower than such expenses under IFRS and therefore reporting post-retirement benefits under IFRS would not be favorable to a company. Once all of the necessary reconciliations were located, a spreadsheet was prepared notating the adjustments for post-retirement benefits. While preparing this spreadsheet, it was vital to ensure that the company information was expressed in the same units. For instance, if a company reported using a foreign currency, the amount was adjusted to US dollars using the noon buying rate as of December 31, 2006. All adjustments were also recorded in the millions of dollars, as some entities report using thousands. Once the spreadsheet was prepared, the match-pair t-test analysis on the data was performed. Because such statistical analyses require a matched pair, it was important to indicate the post-retirement benefit expense under both US GAAP and IFRS. Since the adjustment needed to bring IFRS expense up to US GAAP expense was already indicated, IFRS expense was set to 0 would show US GAAP expense at an amount equal to the difference between the two methods. The match-pair t-test will be the same under these conditions as they would if we knew each expense under each method. Finding this information is difficult, as pension expenses are often lumped in together with other expenses on the income statement and not easy to sort out using the notes to the financial statements. Once the data was ready to analyze, the statistical analysis was performed the using Excels Analysis Toolpak. Results of this study indicated that at twenty five degrees of freedom with an alpha of .05, the t value of the test group was greater than 2.06, which was the t-value indicated in the t-table. This means we can fail to reject the null hypothesis and that there is a difference between the two accounting treatments. Due to the average adjustment to arrive at US GAAP earnings falling in the negative $200 million range, we can loosely conclude that accounting for pension expenses under IFRS is favorable to a company's financial position. Due to the time and resource constraints placed on this study, further research is needed to draw concrete conclusions. Further research is also warranted to determine the reasons for the differences in the accounting treatment. It would be interesting to see whether the differences stem from the differences in discount rates used, or something else such as not being required to use an actuary. What could be done to finish this particular study is to really take the time to analyze each of the test group participant's financial statement and find the underlying pension expenses to get a true portrait of the pension expenses under GAAP and IFRS. To get further analytical evidence, you could compare the pension expense under each method to total expenses under each method. It could be quite possible the pension expenses under IFRS are lower, while their US GAAP counter parts have higher expenses that are a lower percentage of total expenses. Another point worth mentioning is the fact that the companies in the test group are a hodgepodge of various companies; the only stipulation that a company had to meet to get into my group is that they had to be publicly traded on the US stock exchange and report using IFRS. It would be better to use companies that have similar pension plans and similar actuarial assumptions and discount rates. Time is very limited to finish this research; for years ended on or after November 15, 2007 companies reporting using IFRS are no longer required to prepare reconciliations to US GAAP financial results in the footnotes to their financial statements. It is vital to use recent financial data, and as more time goes on it will be harder to do this study as the information needed will not be laid out in the footnotes. With the most current financial information not readily available, the research will have to be done using actual company data which would need to be supplied by third party administrators of employee benefit plans who would be able to translate post-retirement expenses back and forth between US GAAP and IFRS. In conclusion, the limited research performed on the SEC form 20-F for twenty-six foreign corporations traded on the US Stock exchanges points to the possibility that accounting for pension liabilities under IFRS as opposed to US GAAP will be beneficial to a company's earnings. Such research is important because as convergence with IFRS is looming, it is important for US Companies to understand the full effects of changing their accounting methods. Likewise, since reconciliations from IFRS earnings to US GAAP earnings is no longer required in the footnotes to the financial statements, US corporations need to understand how their competitions financial records will look in comparison to their own so that they can look at ways they can mitigate the risk and manage their business so that their statements stay comparable to the competition. It might be quite possible that changes to FAS 158 may be warranted in order to bring the reporting and valuation requirements in line and more comparable to the expenses and liabilities under IAS 19. Nonetheless, accounting for post-retirement benefits is something that both domestic and international CPA's and their equivalents will have to deal with for years to come. Sources Quoted: Peter Fortune (2005, December). Pension Accounting and Corporate Earnings: The World According to GAAP. Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Public Policy Discussion Papers Towers Perrin (2008). Comparison of IAS 19 with FAS 87/88/106/132(R)/158 Summary of Provisions Affecting Accounting for Postretirement Benefits. Retrieved February 5, 2009 from www.towersperrin.com David N. Hurtt, Jerry G. Kreuze, Sheldon A. Langsam (2007, July). Displaying the Funding Status of Postretirement Plans: The Impact of SFAS 158 Disclosure The CPA Journal . Retrieved February 3, 2009, from www.nysscpa.com Sri Rezeki, Subanar & Suryo Guritno. (2006). Model Selection for Neural Networks Classification by Using Matched Pair Comparison Test. Retrieved February 3, 2009 from http://math.usm.my/research/OnlineProc/CS26.pdf Graham Holt (2007, January). IAS 19, Employee Benefits Student Accountant Retrieved February 3, 2009 http://www.accaglobal.com/pubs/students/publications/student_accountant/archive/Holt0107.pdf |
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