FASB weighs stakeholder feedback for accounting priorities
The Financial Accounting Standards Board is reviewing over 100 comment letters and meeting inputs to prioritize its agenda. Stakeholders highlighted hedge accounting, alternative funding, and crypto assets as key areas. This marks the first broad outreach since 2021.
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has begun analyzing feedback from stakeholders, including over 100 comment letters and meetings, to determine future agenda priorities for U.S. accounting standards. Companies, report preparers, and investors provided input on various topics, with consistent emphasis on three areas: risk management and hedge accounting, alternative funding arrangements, and the interaction of consolidation guidance with other transactions. Lower priorities included recognition of interest income and personal financial statements.
About 31 respondents addressed crypto assets, expressing mixed views on prioritization but noting several unresolved challenges that lead to diversity in practice and financial statements not reflecting asset economics. This initiative is the first broad agenda consultation since 2021. The prior effort, started in 2020 under then-new Chair Richard Jones, resulted in new standards for certain crypto assets like Bitcoin—allowing fair value measurement for those with readily determinable fair values—and a focus on disaggregating financial information in reporting.
FASB staff will evaluate over 70 topics this quarter through 2026 using established agenda criteria and outreach findings. The board aims to review each topic next year for potential addition to its high-priority technical agenda. "This is really the first step," Jones said at the Wednesday meeting. "Every single one of these issues will come back for a board vote at a future public meeting. So this is, by no means, your first bite at the apple, I may suggest this is just showing you the apple."
One board member observed that feedback was less concentrated than in 2021, when nearly all respondents supported fair value for Bitcoin-like assets. Some stakeholders suggested expanding Subtopic 350-60 to cover crypto assets created by the entity or related parties and later reacquired in arm's-length transactions. Others called for prioritizing stablecoins, proposing amendments to include highly liquid ones in the cash equivalents definition.