Dialogue with standard setters

There had been several international accounting principles about the accounting treatment for business combinations, over the past years. Last June 2016, the International Accounting Standards Board proposed to amend IFRS 3 Business Combinations with the aim of clarifying the definition of a business. The motivation that pushed the Board to propose the Exposure Draft was to inform that there is a diversity in practice in accounting for previously held interests in the assets and liabilities of a joint operation in two kinds of transaction, those in which an entity obtains control of a business that is a joint operation and those in which it obtains joint control of a business that is a join operation.

The purpose of the following review is to identify whether the board has reached the desired objective, and leads through the historical analysis of the accounting standards concerning business combinations, the analysis of the Exposure Draft and especially the analysis of the comments letters. [Publishers' text].