FASB Prepares to Reprioritize: An Interview with Chairman Leslie Seidman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
FASB Chairman Leslie Seidman, in an exclusive JofA interview, explained how the board plans to finish priority convergence projects on financial instruments, revenue recognition and leases. She also shared how the board intends to reprioritize remaining projects, better serve the needs of private companies, and how its role could change if the SEC mandates the use of IFRS by U.S. public companies. Edited excerpts of the interview follow. Additional questions and answers are available on journalofaccountancy.com; enter 20113940 in the search box to find the article. JofA: The big three priority projects--financial instruments, revenue recognition and leases--have been scheduled to be completed by the end of the second quarter. Is it still realistic at this point for all three of these projects to be finished by the end of the second quarter? Seidman: We are working through the issues on revenue recognition very thoughtfully and expeditiously. So far, we appear to be on track to have concluded our substantive discussions of the issues raised in the exposure draft in that time frame. What we're going to need to do, though, along the way is keep a vigilant eye on the extent of change that we end up with relative to what we exposed, also relative to current U.S. GAAP so that we know whether we need to conduct additional outreach to be comfortable that the standard we end up with is well understood and operational and viewed as an improvement by investors. I'm not at a point right now where I know the extent of outreach that we're going to think is necessary. That could extend the time frame. On leasing, I think that we are in a similar situation. We've made some initial decisions to make simplifications to the model relative to what we have exposed. However, at our [March 2] meeting, the staff came to us with a couple of changes that they proposed and asked for time to do outreach, to check with constituents right now about whether these changes that they're proposing are viewed as responsive to the concerns that were raised, operational, and, again, are they perceived as improvement? Our plan is to continue to work through these issues with June as our goal for completion. But the June date is just a target date to signal our commitment to try and work through these issues as efficiently as we can. But, if we need more time to conduct this thorough process that I'm describing, we will take the time we need. It is much more important to me that we end up with a standard that is perceived around the world as an improvement, and that is operational and comprehensive. JofA: And financial instruments? Seidman: Financial instruments is on a track different from [revenue recognition and leases] in the sense that the IASB and [FASB] started at different points. If I can just digress back to [revenue recognition] and leasing--those we started together. So, we're very much on the same timetables, trying to work toward the final standards. Financial instruments--that was not the case. The IASB issued IFRS 9 [Financial Instruments] last year. We decided to approach it in a more comprehensive manner, issuing one exposure draft to address all of the different aspects of the proposal. Having said that, we are still trying to come together with a converged standard on financial instruments. We're approaching it in phases, though, because of the fact that we started in different places. Our current emphasis is on impairment of financial assets. You mentioned before that we had issued an exposure draft, and let me just correct the terminology there. It does not represent a full-blown exposure draft in the sense that it does not contain all of the guidance that we would expect to include on a standard addressing impairment of financial assets. Rather, it is intended to solicit feedback on a new approach relative to what the FASB exposed and to what the IASB originally exposed with respect to impairment of financial assets. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".