Thursday 13th June, 2013: IAASA has today published a summary of the results of its thematic review of the application of IAS 24 Related Party Disclosures in respect of key management personnel (‘KMP’) disclosures by Irish equity issuers under its remit.
Background
IAS 24 seeks to ensure that financial statements draw attention to the possibility that the financial position and results of operations may have been affected by the existence of, and transactions with, related parties including transactions with KMP. This thematic review focuses on disclosure of compensation payments by an issuer to its KMP.
During the course of its first cycle of reviews undertaken between 2007 and 2012, IAASA identified a number of instances of non-compliance with the relevant financial reporting requirements relating to KMP. As a follow-up to these incidences of non-compliance, IAASA decided to perform a thematic review of Irish equity issuers’ application of the requirements of IAS 24 in respect of the disclosure of KMP compensation. This document provides details of the results of that thematic review.
This work was in the context that IAASA’s financial reporting supervision role is to examine the annual and half-yearly financial reports of equity, debt and fund issuers – whose securities are admitted to trading on a regulated market within the European Union and whose home member state is Ireland – for compliance with the relevant reporting framework.
Results
In general, the standard of compliance with the KMP compensation disclosure requirements of IAS 24 was good, with the majority of issuers meeting the substantive requirements of IAS 24. This is unsurprising for three reasons. Firstly, IAASA had previously received undertakings for improvements from 11 issuers in relation to deficiencies in their KMP disclosures. Secondly, preparers are likely to give particular focus to such disclosures in the knowledge of their scrutiny by users. Thirdly, the requirements of IAS 24 in this regard are relatively straightforward.
However, despite the good quality disclosures of many issuers, there are a number of areas where improvement is warranted and these are discussed in the document.