IASB Surveys Public About Insurance Standard Timeline

The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) is asking members of the public to tell it how they think the board should schedule work on an insurance contract standard contract and other major standards.

IASB, London, a group that sets international accounting standards, and the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), Norwalk, Conn., the group in charge of the U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), originally had hoped to have an insurance accounting standard ready by June.

IASB also is working on many other major standards, and it recently announced that it will need at least a few more months to complete the projects.

IASB is now focusing on just a few major standards, and it and FASB have created a survey to ask financial data users how the boards should go about structuring their standards work.

In the survey, the boards ask, for example, whether the standards should take effect all at once or in some other order, and whether the boards should give companies the option of adopting some or all of the new standards before their mandatory effective date.