FASB Issues Revised Exposure Draft on Earnings per Share
The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) has issued a revised Exposure Draft (ED) of a proposed Statement of Financial Accounting Standards, Earnings per Share – an amendment of FASB Statement No. 128. The proposed statement seeks to improve financial reporting by clarifying and simplifying the method of calculating earnings per share (EPS), while promoting the international convergence of accounting standards by eliminating major differences that currently exist between FASB Statement No. 128, Earnings per Share, and International Accounting Standard (IAS) 33, Earnings per Share. The ED seeks feedback from constituents on whether the proposed statement achieves its goal of amending Statement 128 in a way that simplifies and converges the computation of the denominator of EPS with proposed amendments to IAS 33, issued separately by the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB). As proposed, the statements are intended to improve the comparability of EPS because the denominator used to compute EPS under Statement 128 would be the same as the denominator used to compute EPS under IAS 33, with limited exceptions. Those limited exceptions relate to certain instruments for which the underlying accounting under US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) and international financial reporting standards (IFRS) is different.