Financial Accounting Standards Board held a public meeting April 8 to approve measures intended to provide stakeholders with accounting relief and clarity during the COVID-19 crisis. FASB Chairman Russell G. Golden issued the following statement:

In the coming days, the FASB will issue a proposal to provide certain private companies and not-for-profit organizations with an optional, one-year effective date delay of the leases standard. Stakeholders will have a 15-day comment period from the time of issuance to review and provide comments on the proposal. The FASB will also add a project to its research agenda to see if there are opportunities to provide revenue recognition implementation expedients to franchisors. While that project is ongoing, the private company franchisors will also be given a one-year deferral for the revenue recognition standard.

Additionally, the FASB staff soon will issue a leases question-and-answer document to help stakeholders account for the rapid, unprecedented lease concessions lessors are seeking to provide tenants during the pandemic. The staff also addressed implementation questions about other crisis-related issues, including interest income and loan payment holidays, hedging, and fair value accounting. The staff also noted that they have received questions related to accounting for loans from the Small Business Administration and that they will work with stakeholders to provide accounting clarity in that area as well. This information will be memorialized in FASB’s upcoming summary of tentative Board decisions (TBDs) and meeting minutes to be posted to the FASB website.

We also announced that we will temporarily suspend issuance of other public exposure documents and will defer work that requires public outreach on other technical agenda projects to focus on supporting stakeholders as they navigate the impact of the crisis. Consequently, we have also decided to postpone our May 18, 2020 public leases roundtable meeting to a future date.

Finally, it’s important to note that we recognize that there are other standards with effective dates of 2022 and beyond—and that companies implementing them are also suffering from a dislocation of accounting staff and a reallocation of resources. I want to assure them that the FASB is committed to understanding how the COVID-19 crisis is impacting their transition plans, and we will continue to address issues at a future Board meeting, including addressing the need for more time related to adoption.

I would like to thank my fellow FASB members and the entire FASB technical staff for their diligent work in recent weeks to support our stakeholders. We will continue to closely monitor questions and concerns from our stakeholders, and we encourage them to continue to share them with us so we can help them during this difficult time. Questions can be submitted through the FASB’s Technical Inquiry Service.