The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) published an Invitation to Comment (ITC) that gives stakeholders the opportunity to provide feedback on its future standard-setting agenda. Stakeholders are asked to review and provide comment on the ITC by Sept. 22.

The ITC is a FASB staff document; it does not include Board views. Rather, it is intended to solicit broad stakeholder feedback on what the FASB’s future agenda priorities should be. The feedback on the ITC is essential in ensuring that the FASB continues to allocate its finite resources to achievable standard-setting projects that fulfill its primary mission of improving financial accounting and reporting standards and addressing topics that are of the highest priority to its stakeholders. The Board will consider the feedback received from the ITC when making any changes to its agenda.

“Since launching the agenda consultation process in late 2020, the FASB staff has spoken with more than 200 stakeholders who provided input on what topics they think the Board should address next,” said FASB Technical Director Hillary H. Salo. “We drew upon their diverse, thoughtful, and insightful feedback to develop our June 2021 Invitation to Comment, which gives all stakeholders the chance to share their views on priority topics and potential solutions for the Board’s consideration.”

The ITC summarizes stakeholder input received during the initial agenda consultation outreach, which generally fell within the following types of projects:

• Requiring greater disaggregation of financial reporting information to provide investors with better, more useful information that will directly influence their decisions and behaviors;
• Addressing emerging transactions to reduce diversity in practice and retain the relevancy of the FASB Accounting Standards Codification;
• Reevaluating specific areas of existing GAAP to reduce unnecessary complexity; and
• Enhancing certain FASB standard-setting processes.

Stakeholders are asked to provide feedback on what topics, if any, they think the Board should address as top priorities, as well as prioritization of projects on the FASB’s current technical agenda.

“Stakeholder input will play a pivotal role in helping the FASB identify areas where there’s a pervasive need to improve GAAP,” said FASB Chair Richard R. Jones. “What we learn during the agenda consultation process will help us decide what issues we can successfully address with feasible solutions whose benefits are likely to justify the expected costs of change.”

The ITC, including information about how to submit comments, is available at the FASB website.