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In March 2024, the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) published the Exposure Draft Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment. The Exposure Draft proposed amendments to: 

  • IFRS 3 Business Combinations—in particular, to improve the information companies disclose about the performance of business combinations; and
  • IAS 36 Impairment of Assets—in particular, amendments to the impairment test of cash-generating units containing goodwill.

The IASB is redeliberating the proposals.

IASB® Update May 2025

The IASB met on 20 May 2025 to discuss the proposals in its Exposure Draft Business Combinations—Disclosures, Goodwill and Impairment to add, amend and remove disclosure requirements in IFRS 3 Business Combinations, except for the proposals relating to disclosures of performance and expected synergy information.

The IASB tentatively decided to retain the proposed disclosure objectives to guide its redeliberations of the proposed performance and expected synergy disclosure requirements in a future meeting.

All 14 IASB members agreed with this decision.

For the proposals relating to the contribution of an acquired business, the IASB tentatively decided:

  1. to withdraw the proposal to specify that combined entity information is an accounting policy;
  2. to add a requirement for an entity to disclose the basis on which it has prepared combined entity information;
  3. to retain the proposal to explain the purpose of the requirement for combined entity information; and
  4. to retain the proposal not to provide application guidance on how to prepare combined entity information for the contribution of an acquired business.

All 14 IASB members agreed with these decisions.

For the proposals relating to the contribution of an acquired business, the IASB also tentatively decided to retain the proposal to specify that the amount of profit or loss is the amount of operating profit or loss as defined in IFRS 18 Presentation and Disclosure in Financial Statements.

Twelve of 14 IASB members agreed with this decision.

The IASB also tentatively decided to retain the proposals:

  1. to replace the requirement to disclose the primary reasons for a business combination with a requirement to disclose the strategic rationale for a business combination; and
  2. to improve the quality of information an entity discloses about pension and financing liabilities assumed in a business combination by:
    1. deleting the word ‘major’ from paragraph B64(i) of IFRS 3; and
    2. adding pension and financing liabilities as classes of liabilities assumed in the illustrative example in paragraph IE72 of the Illustrative Examples on IFRS 3 Business Combinations; and
  3. to delete the disclosure requirements in IFRS 3 related to acquired receivables (paragraph B64(h)), subsequent deferred tax adjustments (paragraph B67(d)(iii)) and subsequent material gains or losses (paragraph B67(e)).

All 14 IASB members agreed with this decision.

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